Blog 1: Welcome to DevHoolagins

Welcome new reader! I am not too familiar with what I want to do with this blog, so I’ll keep things short and hopefully remotely interesting.

Introduction

Hello! I am Caleb Cunningham, A software developer/engineer of 4 years, and someone who has more recently gotten into ““self improvement”” in terms of trying to excel at my job, and generally try to make myself more interested in programming and related topics than I may be naturally.

I first wrote code in my Computer Science I course at Oklahoma State University, and that class really stuck with me. In high school I was planning on enrolling in an HVAC course, and through some life events and some convincing from family to at least try pursuing engineering due to my academic inclinations. This class was deeply interesting to me, and programming throughout my Computer Engineering degree at OSU.

My story

After being in the workforce a little bit and being at my second company a lot of the charm wore off, as projects at increased pressure, and the whole 2022/2023 mass layoffs where happening in tech. I was happy to have a job, and desperate to do better as I had come under a microscope for delaying a project. This was the start of 2024, and I’ve learned a lot since then. I wasn’t able to simply move to another job due to said tech mass layoffs, and I was not going to move me and my wife of 2.5 years back into either of our parents’ houses.

I was then left with one choice: get meaningfully better, and fast enough to be worth keeping. I started negotiating harder with our product team and with my team what I was comfortable with taking on and on what timeline. I started more closely documenting what I was doing (some level of that was already required), and I started working on being a better developer outside of work. Got into watching Theo (pre-ai phase) and Primeagen (pre-podcast phase), started reading The Pragmatic Programmer and The Software Engineer’s Guidebook, and I got more aggressive with unblocking myself.

This pressure on me, and the understanding dawning on me that this, assuming I do it for a career, is what I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life, drove me to try to improve and embrace this as a part of my life. I’d like to get in a financial position where I can comfortably leave tech and go teach math or computer science in a middleschool/highschool context, but for now this must do.

Loose plans for this blog

I want to put some code explorations here, similar to Sebastian Lague, some tinkerings, maybe some opinion pieces (like a piece on WFM and work-life balance), but plan on this being a relatively inactive site. I’ll edit this if that changes.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you! I appreciate you taking the time to read my little story of my career as of time of writing, and I hope to make some posts worthy of reading.