+++
title= "Back in engineering!"
description= "I'm moving back in core engineering"
date= 2025-01-15T00:37:27+01:00
path = "posts/back-engineering"
extra.hide_table_of_contents = true

[taxonomies]
tags= ["personal"]
+++

Time flies—it’s already 2025! Looking back, 2024 was an incredibly fast-paced year for me professionally as an Engineering Manager. This year, I’ve decided to take a new direction and return to a more engineering-focused role.

I moved in a management position early 2023. It was a time where my company was growing fast (from 20-ish to 60-ish), and we needed coordination to ship things out in parallel, but also to [migrate customers \(and ourselves!\) to new datacenters](https://www.clever-cloud.com/blog/company/2023/12/21/our-journey-to-a-better-clever-cloud/). With my on-call experience, I helped our CTO, Steven, bootstrap two data-oriented teams and later led the Materia team, shaping its technology.

During this time, we successfully launched [Materia KV in its Alpha version](https://www.clever-cloud.com/blog/features/2024/06/11/materia-kv-our-easy-to-use-serverless-key-value-database-is-available-to-all/) and built strong internal trust in FoundationDB. Our largest cluster effortlessly handles hundreds of thousands of writes per second, and [the ability to simulate Rust code within FDB’s simulation framework](https://github.com/foundationdb-rs/foundationdb-rs/tree/main/foundationdb-simulation) has significantly boosted our developers' confidence.

Management is a rewarding challenge, like unlocking a new skill tree to walk through. Resources like [The Manager's Path](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-managers-path/9781491973882/) or [Engineering Management for the Rest of Us](https://www.engmanagement.dev) can give you a head-start and should be read by anyone. Blogs like [Charity Majors](https://charity.wtf/tag/management/page/2/) are also useful to read, especially [The Engineer/Manager Pendulum](https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/) and its [follow-up](https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/).

After nearly two years, I feel it's the right time to return to core engineering. I just miss it.  From the start, my manager and I had an understanding that I could transition back whenever I wanted to—and that time is now. I've found an excellent manager to lead the team, giving me the space to focus on the technical side of Materia. I also should have more time to work around open-source, and I'm looking forward to it.