From fascination with technology to engineering leadership
From fascination with technology to engineering leadership
Apparently I’ve always been a massive nerd.
On 30 August 2013, I was in California on my way to a World Touring Car Championship event and realised I wasn’t far from Apple’s Infinite Loop campus. There was absolutely no chance I wasn’t making the detour.
I remember being excited just standing outside 1 Infinite Loop. Apple was one of those companies that had made me fascinated by technology in the first place, so getting to see where some of it happened was a pretty big deal to me.
What makes me smile looking back is that I had absolutely no idea where my own career was going to take me. I certainly wouldn’t have believed that a few years later my work would take me back to Silicon Valley, or that I’d eventually get the opportunity to work with Apple, Amazon Web Services, Google and some of the other large technology companies I’d spent years reading about. And I definitely wouldn’t have predicted that I’d end up leading engineering in defence.
Looking at that photograph thirteen years later made me realise how much my relationship with technology has changed. Back then I was fascinated by the technology itself. I still am, if I’m honest. But these days I’m probably even more interested in everything that has to happen around the technology to make it useful.
The people. The organisation. The engineering decisions. The trade-offs. And all the complicated stuff happening behind the scenes that the end user hopefully never has to think about.
Maybe that’s just what happens when you spend long enough working in technology. You start out wanting to understand how all the cool stuff works. Then one day you find yourself responsible for creating the environment in which other people can build it.
I’m not entirely sure 2013 me would have predicted any of that. He’d probably just be disappointed that I still haven’t managed to get an office at Infinite Loop.
Still a massive nerd though.
