This week I was able to hit a big milestone after overcoming a lot of technical hurdles, both in understanding and with platforms such as Github. For Github, I downloaded Github Desktop and also downloaded the GitLens plugin. Both tools made my life so much easier after I unsuccessfully merged something into main but ended up replacing everything so that everything was considered “new”. It was good that our team decided to make a fork of our team repository in the chance these things might happen. In terms of the PR contents, I finally was able to link the auth link so that when the user pressed the button, Google Sign-in would pop-up. My next step is to work on obtaining the callback uri that google sends, and obtain the auth code to send to back end. I will also be looking into implementing google maps so the user can identify where bikes are on the map and select it from there. There has been a lot of google reading lately. I will explain this more in my stand-up discussion, so I will spend some time in the next paragraph talking about my career.

I am currently at a crossroads with my career. My interests lie in both product management and mobile development. I am currently a technical project manager and am finding that managing people, having meetings, navigating politics, working with big egos, influence without authority, etc are very difficult for me. I am realizing that any kind of position in the tech industry where you are directly working in software (or hardware), the more technical knowledge you have, the more respect you will get and thus more influence. I don’t like having heavy reliance on engineers for technical knowledge, and there is no insight into the technical decisions that need to be made so you are now just a glorified messenger between teams. I am thinking I need some kind of level of mastery of mobile development, understanding of all the levels (BSP, HAL, app, etc) in order to be a product manager. Maybe my perspective is not mature because I am not yet a product manager, but at least as a project manager I feel the need to start off with a strong technical foundation.