Full Stack Journey 013: Chris Wahl

Episode 13 of the Full Stack Journey podcast takes us away from focusing on specific technology areas and back into hearing about a guest’s own personal journey.
Joining me (Scott, your host) this month is Chris Wahl. Many of you probably already know of Chris; he’s one of the co-hosts of Datanauts, an extremely popular “sister” podcast on the Packet Pushers network. Chris is also active on Twitter (his handle is @ChrisWahl), and runs a popular technical blog.
Show Notes

* What triggered your journey?

* Chris’s “Don’t be a Minesweeper” presentation (he thought it was 5 years ago; SlideShare says closer to 3 years ago) is what he marks as the start of his own journey
* He felt limited and felt like he couldn’t get where he wanted in his career—like he was spending all his time trying to avoid landing on a mine and exploding
* So he started moving outside his comfort zone


* On the topic of being a “full stack engineer”:

* Completely agrees with the idea behind working toward being a full stack engineer
* It’s not about knowing everything down to the most minute detail (like firmware microcode)
* More about the ability to flex outside of a single discipline (or a couple disciplines)
* “Partial stack” and “half stack” just don’t sound as good anyway


* Can one ever be done with their full stack journey?

* No! You need to always be growing. Chris likens it to going up on the down escalator, where if you’re not actively working to prevent it you’re headed back down
* It’s really about the intent, and it’s a great mindset to cultivate to always pursue growth and development


* Folks need to be careful not to grow too comfortable, lest technology (the escalator) push them back into irrelevance
* It was the movie “Office Space” that triggered Chris’ journey
* Some other pivot points in Chris’ career:

* Going from a one-man shop to a larger shop with other people to challenge him
* Learning automation and code (“because I’m lazy”)


* What’s next for you on your journey?

* Chris’ decisions are guided by his “general compass”, which is driven by his voracious reading appetite
* That makes him 1-2 years “out of date” or “behind” but he feels that works well for him (more cutting edge than bleeding edge)
* Some specific technologies he’s tackled over the last few years: PowerShell, Git (and GitHub), and Azure (including Azure Resource Manager and Terraform)


* What are you reading? Or, what should listeners read?

* The Site Reliability Engineering book from O’Reilly is one that Chris promotes a lot
* The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim is another good read
* Currently working through xUnit Test Patterns to challenge his way of approaching things and get back toward test-driv...