Refactoring My Career
First post here. I joined Medium to read, mostly, but I’ve been wanting to share a bit of myself too. So, how I actually got to where I am, not the polished version.
My beginnings were a mix, journalism, communication, production, photography and videography. A bit of everything before anything clicked into place. I ended up as a videographer, doing the whole hands on side of production. Then I moved into studio manager, and if you asked people what that means they’d probably picture someone managing a team, doing schedules and one on ones. That’s not really what I do.
The bigger part is finding solutions for whatever the recording actually requires. Streaming to different platforms, connecting our studio to another one, bringing in callers from around the world, running tests beforehand so the audio actually holds up before going live.
I think that’s also just how I’m wired. I consider myself a fixer. When something isn’t working, or isn’t working as well as it could, there’s a kind of itch that won’t leave me alone until I’ve done something about it.
That itch is what got me into hands on development in the first place. We had no real way to know what equipment we had, where it was, or who had it. Cameras, lenses, mics, were tracked in people’s memory. I built a small app for it on my own time. Nothing huge, just something that shows what we have and where it is.
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Building that taught me more than I expected. Not just what to track, but why data actually matters in the first place. I’ve always been a bit of a generalist, interested in too many things at once, and data turned out to give me the scope to learn about all of them, one dataset at a time.
Alongside the day job I did a development course and I’m now in a data engineering program, working through real datasets and building pipelines. I’ve also talked, informally, with people who actually work in these kinds of roles, just to get a real sense of what the day to day looks like, not just the job description version. I also want to mention how generous people have been whenever I’ve shared with someone that I’m willing to learn.
I’m still in this role. This isn’t a “and now I’m a data engineer” post, I’m right at the start of it. And honestly, even starting to think about a career change was hard. But this tech side kept growing on me, and I feel genuinely enthusiastic about it.
I’m learning about something called slowly changing dimensions in the data program, basically how you handle a record that changes over time without losing where it came from. Type 2 keeps the full history, it doesn’t overwrite the old row, it adds a new one and marks when it changed. I like that idea more than I expected to. It’s kind of what’s happening with me right now, I’m not erasing the old version of myself, I’m just adding a new row and keeping the history.
I spent a long time assuming the “creative” path and the “technical” path were different tracks, and that I had to pick one. Turns out the same instinct, noticing what’s broken, figuring out why, building something that works, brings the same creative rush either way.
Honestly, this path feels a bit solitary sometimes. Studying at night, building things nobody asked for, not knowing yet if it leads anywhere official. If you’re in a similar spot, I’d like to hear from you, feel free to write to me. I’d rather figure this out with some company. 😊
