Personal

Finding one’s place within the pack

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Back in January, I silenced the sceptical voices in my head and conquered my impostor syndrome. I stepped away from the comfort and familiarity of my role at Stickee – a company where I was fortunate enough to cut my teeth and spend four years honing my craft with bleeding-edge Laravel technologies – in search of my next great challenge. That search led me to Overwolf, where I ultimately found my place within the Tebex payments team.

Looking back, I still find it hard to believe I made it through the recruitment process. Make no mistake, Overwolf is highly selective about whom they welcome into their ranks, and the multi-stage application process was nothing short of an ordeal, akin to running a gauntlet through a den of wolves. On particularly challenging days, I remind myself of this: I earned my place here.

Thus far, my experience has been nothing short of fantastic. I feel both supported in my professional growth and genuinely cared for in terms of my well-being, all while being entrusted with complex, technically demanding problems across the intricate code infrastructure. When I joined, I harboured concerns about readjusting to corporate life; my last stint at a large international software company was an internship at Amadeus in 20161, and I would be lying if I claimed I wasn’t wary of the potential for stifling monotony or the insidious creep of bureaucracy… particularly the kind that disguises itself as agile while rigidly adhering to waterfall principles.

Thankfully, those fears have proven completely unfounded. The breadth of work I’ve encountered so far has been both engaging and rewarding, but above all, I’ve relished the camaraderie that permeates the organisation. Honestly, there’s something profoundly motivating about working alongside talented individuals who share a genuine passion for what they do and for their colleagues. Something not at all dissimilar to what I experienced at Stickee.

I’m eager to immerse myself in the challenges yet to come, striving to create meaningful contributions to tools that empower gamers across the world. I’ve always been obsessed with being able to make a demonstrable difference to others in the work that I do. I can certainly do that here.

  1. Not that Amadeus in Bad Homburg had any of those, mind you! But one does hear horror stories from friends and colleagues working at larger tech companies. ↩︎

Switching back to WordPress

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For the past five or so years, I’ve meandered back and forth between various site generators: Gatsby, Hugo, Jekyll, and most recently, Jigsaw. It has been an exercise in tedium keeping the website up-to-date and wrestling with whatever template or starter kit I had used, and honestly, I simply cannot be bothered with it at all anymore.

I know many of you will argue that it couldn’t be simpler than editing text in Markdown and committing it to a repository, and you’d be right. I’m well aware of headless WordPress and countless other CMS systems available to be used with static site generators.

Regardless, I noticed that my blogging over the last few years dried up since migrating away from a traditional WordPress-based website, or when the site was hosted on Hashnode, which behaved in much the same way – WYSIWYG word processing that was more conducive to my way of thinking.

I’m sure many people will disagree and that’s fine. Some developers parrot the same talking points on X about the need for an over-the-top portfolio and stunningly designed website. I’d rather keep things simple – an out-of-the-box template that just works and let my writing and projects do the rest. Nobody’s hiring me based on my ability to style a static website or blog.

After all, if something’s tedious or cumbersome for me to work with, I just won’t bother. If I have to faff around with configuration files and post-generation hooks to build out functionality, I’ll just go build the stuff that I want to focus on instead. This lets me do both.

I’ve been indefatigable in improving my reading intake this year and subsequently want to spend the remaining quarter of the year writing more frequently as the ideal counterpart for that behaviour; aiming for a piece of writing on something I’ve encountered or worked with at least once a week.

Until then, thanks for visiting!