11–20 of 37 posts
I have gone from being an Infrastructure Team Leader looking after 120 servers to a Lecturer and teach around 120 students.I get a much greater sense of fulfillment working with people. I'm also surprised to find teaching is harder work than a 24/7 saas. You can become removed from your users in IT. Your users in teaching are right in front of you with all their joy, stuff of life, and drama.
More and more, I also build contacts in and around Berlin's government to effect change at a lower level, instead of building a nice layer on top of a crap bureaucracy.
It has been my full time job since 2020, and it's still going pretty solid. I absolutely love it, in part because the work itself is fun, and in part because I have a kind and grateful audience.
I describe the why and the how here: https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/all-about-berlin
I’m the Director of IT Operations for a contract research organization (CRO). While that might not sound inherently interesting it’s deeply fulfilling. My role involves building and maintaining software that help facilitate critical research for NIH and NCI, often supporting breakthroughs in healthcare and science. I love the intersection of technology, problem-solving, and enabling teams to deliver life-changing results by helping change the standard of care for people affected by cancer.
Outside of work, I’m heavily involved with FIRST robotics, which is a worldwide competitive robotics program for high school age students. It’s an amazing initiative where students design, build, and program robots to compete in team-based challenges. And it’s very fun. I mentor students, guiding them through the technical challenges we come up against and help them discover their own potential. Watching young minds light up is very rewarding. Being a small part of that community is one of the most rewarding things I do.
I went from software engineering to navigating people through German bureaucracy. It started as a simple blog, but applied a lot of software engineering knowledge to the problems I face. Simple things like using calculated variables in my content, monitoring German legal texts for changes, and building calculators and letter generators for my readers. I also implement more complex things like a custom static site gen…
Traveling and working with others face to face was a big part of the job I enjoyed; COVID destroyed that.
It’s fun. I’m never bored. I’d never have imagined this would be my life.
Currently, I'm 'de-obfuscating' a codebase that was unintentionally obfuscated by having a list of 'steps' that are composed into 'pipelines' and share a communication datastructure. People in general are really bad at making DSLs (see Greenspun's tenth rule[0]). If you've ever used a framework that encodes coarse instructions in JSON, you get the gist of where this was headed. The direct way would be to have humans write out the equivallent in plain statically-typed code without shared mutable state. Using an LLM may be of help but still needs human checking. So I instead made a code generator that uses the DSL structures at runtime and self-inspection to write the equivalent plain code. It's not perfect, so always generates from the DSL structures and compares that to the hand-made implementation by showing a diff of the overridden sections. This way it stay's in sync until we flip the switch to use the new code.
TL;DR - There are no small parts, only small actors.
I discovered the world of medical devices by accident and it’s great. When the bosses are nice, it’s pure heaven. I write code in C# or C++ (but also Python, pipelines, scripts, JS, etc.) and it needs to be somewhat efficient. We all follow the same rules (62304 especially), we must write unit tests, and make sure that my features are properly integrated at all steps of the development up to the release, and even aft…