Career

Posts that either contain information about my career to date, talk about what I want from the future, and/or may contain helpful career advice.

There are only opportunities

Foggy morning at the beach

When I worked at Ford as a shiny new graduate in the early noughties, they told me "don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions". They also said, never phrase anything as a "problem" but as an "opportunity". The cynical senior who worked on our team told me it was because Ford had been sued too … Read more

Staying Relevant in the Tech Industry

Thumbnail image for the video "Staying Relevant in Tech"

My latest video for the Continuous Delivery YouTube channel is about staying up to date in tech. For the last couple of years, all anyone can talk about is AI, and it can make you feel like you're becoming irrelevant if you're not learning or using AI. Don't worry, this is a feeling that is pretty much constant in tech, and is not specifically related to the hype around AI. So I dusted off an old talk, which was based on an older blog post, about how to stay up to date in technology, and condensed it to a twelve-minute YouTube video (transcript below, if you prefer to read). Enjoy.

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Getting Started with Presenting

Martin Thompson and Trisha Gee

Context and Background

It's currently 2024, and I was looking for some "Getting Started with DevRel" content from my blog. All my posts are in a GitHub repo/IntelliJ IDEA Project first, and then ported into WordPress at some point. Searching my IntelliJ project I found this post, which apparently I wrote in 2020 and never published! What's more confusing is that it's based off something I wrote in 2014, so it was written 10 years ago and then I failed to publish it twice.

So, with that in mind I'm going to publish it as-is and hope that there are some useful bits and pieces in there for someone. Better than having it stuck in my drafts folder forever.

Welcome to 2020, all over again...

I have loads of advice for aspiring speakers, which is lucky because I get asked about how to get started (or how I got started) all the time. I found an email I sent to someone absolutely years ago (2014) and thought it useful enough to dust off and post. It's interesting to see my mindset back then because now I've largely forgotten what it was like in the early days.

The timing is not great, since in these Coronavirus times no-one's going to or presenting at conferences, but I firmly believe that with all these virtual events and conferences there's a much lower barrier to entry to speaking, and that now is exactly the right time to start presenting if it's something you've ever had on your wish list.

"I was hoping I could get some advice off you as I'm starting to look at ways to get out and speak a little bit more at events. Would you have some insights from how you started?"

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Working Smarter, not Harder

This is a post I've been meaning to write for eight and a half years. Inspired by this tweet from Ceora, I'm finally doing it.

I have a question for parents in tech, especially moms.

How has having children impacted your career?

I wanna hear the good, the bad and the ugly. Tell me whatever you’re comfortable sharing 😛

— ceora🌸🌺 (@ceeoreo_) May 15, 2024

The most immediate impact having a baby had on my career is I needed to work much smarter not harder. Babies (and children) take up all that so-called free time, and and almost all of your not-free-time, that you used to have.

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Time Management for Parents

Photo of my desk area

I wrote a 3000 word blog post in response to a Tweet about how having kids changed my career (which in retrospect probably doesn't even answer the question). So I decided to pull this section out into its own post. It became a 2000 word blog post about planning, sigh. This is why I find it hard to find time to blog.

So here are my Top Tips For Time Management And Planning for Working Parents.

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Gradle Gradle Gradle, with Gradle we’re going to play

I know I owe you a blog post1, and today I actually have the time, energy and inclination to write it. It's not often those three factors coincide.

I have already done the Great Reveal about the job I am doing now that I'm no longer at JetBrains.

The question I wanted to answer (if only to remind myself later in life!) is why?

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What’s Next for Trisha?

Right. It's about time I started looking for my next job/gig/source-of-income. I'll be honest, 9 months of sabbatical has not been as restful as I had hoped, but apparently writing two books and taking on the ownership of a restaurant are not restful activities. Who knew?

Anyway this blog post is because it's too hard to explain in 140 characters (OK fine 280, but I'm old school) what I'm looking for. There are three main paths I'm exploring:

  1. Developer Advocacy
  2. Engineering
  3. Consulting & Training

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End of an Era

Tomorrow, 22nd December 2021, is my last day at JetBrains.

I can't believe I've been here a whole seven years! I've never stayed anywhere even half that amount of time, I usually jump jobs every 1-2 years. I spent 4 years at LMAX, but I did have a tiny break in the middle to go and work for ThoughtWorks for 3 months.

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Being a Developer Advocate at JetBrains

Mandatory initial exclamation about how little I have blogged here lately. Over a year without updates, oh dear! But a) I have been blogging quite a lot for the IntelliJ IDEA and Upsource blogs, and b) I had another baby, which kept me quite busy.

So on that topic (more or less) I get a lot of questions about my job: what’s involved in the job, what’s it like working for JetBrains, what does a Developer Advocate do, what’s it like working remotely etc etc. Given I also rather generously1 recently offered to answer people’s questions about my job, I thought the most scalable way was to write-once-read-many, i.e. write it in a single blog post for everyone to read.

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