Career

I’m a bit of a productivity nerd, I’ll admit. Over the last couple of years, I’ve cultivated a workflow that revolved around a lot of OS X tools that I LOVED: Alfred TextExpander iTerm2 These tools were my bread and butter. My professional life, if you will. However, I found myself in a bit of an odd spot in recent months–my MacBook Air was proving to be underpowered for running VM’s, and doing any sort of virtualized anything (which I wanted to be able to do for some training and other projects).

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I thought I was productive. I used a whiteboard (still do, by the way) for my todo lists, was running a Windows laptop for work, and that worked. When I moved to Texas and started working at Rackspace, things changed…drastically. First, my workload changed, and it changed how I had to approach my workload. I went from a workload that was so full of technical snowflakes (read ‘Unique and one-off issues’) and remote support (me logging into customers’ laptops and desktops), that any sort of automation was useless.

Whew, I’m catching up on posting for the Support Driven Writing Challenge, and I’m fairly caught up at this point. So this week’s post is a ‘Day In the Life’ of whatever it is you do. Since I’m in my first ever third shift position, this should be interesting! The Schedule Before coming to DigitalOcean, I was in a ‘normal’ 9-5 position. Then, I flipped completely over to 3rd shift when I joined DO.

I’ve told pieces of my story in recent posts. You know, the ones about Homebrewing being a salvation, and moving to a role in Customer Success at DigitalOcean. I don’t think I’ve ever posted about the long, circuitous route that my career has taken. Perhaps it’s time to tell you the story. So sit back and grab a cup of joe…this ride is known to cause whiplash. Trust me, the trail from aspiring academic to customer success engineer is not exactly the smoothest.

Starting Out Back in April, I started a new role as a customer success engineer with DigitalOcean. Admittedly, I didn’t know what to expect coming from being a systems administrator. During the interview process, I got the impression that the role was a mixture of account management, solutions engineering, and support. Now three months into the role, I can confidently say that with regard to duties, my impression was more or less spot on.