This week marks a new chapter in my startup journey: I’m transitioning from my role building incorporation forms on our frontend to being the on-call engineer. After months of crafting user interfaces and streamlining the entity formation process, I’m stepping into a position that puts me on the front lines of our production environment.
Between my usual coursework and TA responsibilities, I’ll be the first line of defense for our system’s health. The role brings its own unique rhythm – constant monitoring of performance dashboards, swift responses to alert pings, and detailed documentation for our senior engineers. Each notification could mean a critical bug needs fixing or a performance bottleneck needs addressing. It’s quite different from designing form validations and optimizing user flows, but it’s teaching me the real-world implications of every line of code we push to production.
The same discipline that helps me juggle my CS courses and TA duties comes in handy now. Every alert is a learning opportunity, every incident report a chance to deepen my understanding of our systems. While I’ll miss the satisfaction of seeing new features come to life in our incorporation workflow, there’s a different kind of fulfillment in ensuring our entire platform runs smoothly for users across the globe.
Time to prepare for standup and another day of keeping our services running smoothly. The metrics look stable for now, but in this role, you never know what the next notification might bring.
Cheers
