Standing outside a sunny Brussels train station this February, I was starting my journey back home to Edinburgh.
In a few days, I’d be starting a new job, as a video-focussed devrel for Elastic.
Even though I’d been in devrel for the last few years, this job felt different. I think I saw an opportunity to be… my aspirational self. Maybe, I thought, I could not just make technical videos. Maybe, I thought I could make genuinely entertaining videos - like the Olivers and Stewarts of the world. Or at least, the Fireships of the world.
I’d written code, recorded videos, and cracked jokes before. All I needed to do was learn new tech, video production, and comedy writing. How hard could it be?
Well, I found myself resigning just seven months later. To say that things hadn’t quite gone the way I’d hoped would be like saying that Charlie Brown almost kicked the football. Charlie was close, but he wasn’t really close.
As it turns out, you don’t suddenly become a hilarious professional joke writer overnight. Or, even, over a six-month period. Here are some of my writing efforts:
“Don’t write ‘follow best practices’ [into your agent skill] - that’s not guidance, that’s a fortune cookie”
“Users began to complain that their agents got worse… now, this is the ‘they don’t make things like they used to’ of the AI world”
Here’s another one:
We all love a good detective story - whether it’s Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, or Detective Pikachu
This may be the worst use of the “rule of three” imaginable. It’s… embarrassing. The punchline is literally a film that unironically has “detective” in its name!
But once I look past my typically harsh self-assessment, I am proud of the work and grateful that I had the opportunity.
My boss gave me the freedom to get on with my work, while I got to learn from colleagues like Leonie, Rob, Carly and many others who were exceptionally good at theirs.
This job let me dip my toe into new worlds. I got books on writing funny and visual composition. I taught myself video editing software, and even took a beginner class on comedy writing. Even if - I might succeed more at writing funny than writing funny.
And much like writing, I discovered that I enjoyed editing, particularly the satisfaction of taking a piece of work to completion. I wrote, recorded, and edited a bunch of videos end-to-end - many of which I’m even proud of. I think (hope?) they were useful to some.
That’s thing, though, these were all new skills to me.
I love watching comedians and satirists who’ve turned informing people through humour into an art form. I admire the craft and courage that go into their work. But despite how much I admired it, I’d never actually spent much time practising those skills myself.
I think I had confused admiring someone’s craft with wanting to dedicate myself to it.
Meanwhile, working in a role that was ~70% creative and 30% technical made me realise how much I missed problem-solving. At a time when LLMs are turning software engineering upside down, I increasingly wanted to be hands-on again. I’ve always enjoyed being a generalist, and I was curious about what that might mean for the kind of engineering work I’d do next.
So when I started discussing a potential engineering role at Weaviate with my old colleagues, it felt like an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. There’s plenty of uncertainty. But if the seven months at Elastic taught me anything, it’s that I have to have the journey that I’d imagined to make it worthwhile.