It’s time for my 6th annual review after what I realise now has been 10 years of blogging. That being said, I’ve only managed to release one blog post since the last review, but I’m okay with that.
This is the fourth year in a row of significant life and career changes, and based on current plans and discussions, 2025 shows no signs of slowing down.
For this year’s review, I fed ChatGPT last year’s review, explained my dilemma with how to write this year’s review and how I’m looking to change the direction of this blog, and asked it to suggest some discussion points for me. Its suggestions weren’t bad and allowed me to write an initial draft.
Previous years: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018.
Life changes
Let’s start with the big-ticket items, the major changes in my life since the last end of year review.
- Director of Engineering: This year, I jumped a few bandings at ClearBank, successfully completing two interim positions and being promoted to Director of Engineering for Payments. My engineering teams build and maintain ClearBank’s UK & EU payment rails, APIs, webhooks, and Open Banking integrations.
- Baby #2: A new addition to the family 😊 Our daughter Lucy arrives in April.
Key milestones, areas of growth, and reflections
Looking back over the year, this is what comes to mind.
- Director of Engineering: Moving into a senior leadership role was a big deal for me. Not only did I survive a re-org despite my interim position, but I have also found success in this role and an approach that allows me to stay hands-on and translate my understanding of what engineers experience into org-wide initiatives. Unfortunately, it sometimes leaves me with the dangerous feeling that I’m the only one who really understands what’s going on, which isn’t good for anyone.
- Kubernetes migration: I’ve found myself in charge of ClearBank’s engineer-wide migration from Service Fabric (don’t ask) to AKS (Azure’s k8s platform). Since taking over, the migration efforts have seen a significant push forward, and my data-driven approach has allowed us to set some realistic delivery expectations. It has also given me some big learnings in project management and allowed me to form my own opinions on running engineering-wide initiatives.
- Developer experience: The more I work in larger engineering organisations, the more I find myself getting involved with developer experience. However, one bugbear of mine is setting standards or demanding work across engineering teams with no effort to enable them – for example, the above AKS migration and things like API standards/governance. Standards and arbitrary deadlines don’t help unless you have a clear plan to enable, embed, and only then enforce them (I’m still looking for a better word for that last one).
- Web security: I’ve found myself using my niche more and more in my day job. It’s not only useful to have a niche to fall back on, but it’s also something I’ve been able to use to complement my engineering leadership role. This year, my experience in this area has allowed me to be the bridge between ClearBank’s engineering and security departments since I understand the reality of both sides, work with compliance for PSD2 requirements, and unblock ClearBank’s EU banking license. This has led to the engineering team responsible for API security being moved to my area to take advantage of my experience.
- Green Software for Practitioners: An honourable mention goes to this free course from the Linux Foundation. This course introduced me to carbon and energy efficiency and embodied carbon concepts that go well beyond the basics and eye roll-inducing advice such as “use dark mode”. Net zero almost feels impossible unless we all work towards it.
- Work/life balance: With my busy brain and early mornings, I’ve found space to stay hands-on at ClearBank despite my leadership role. This has allowed me to deep dive into codebases, address tech debt across the org, and perform various analysis tasks we all want to do but cannot find the time for. In reality, I’m putting in extra hours here, but it’s either my work laptop or my personal laptop. Unfortunately, I find it very hard to suppress Grumpy Scott in meetings after a fun morning of coding on a personal project and playing a video game, so fun work projects it is!
The state of scottbrady.io
I wrote one article this year, and I’m okay with that. This content drought wasn’t due to a lack of ideas but a conscious prioritisation decision.
I started this blog as a learning tool for myself and to start building a personal brand; in that regard, it has served its purpose. Since starting this blog, I have become an industry expert in my niche and built enough of an engineering reputation to get me career opportunities that would otherwise have been impossible. This evidence of expertise was great as an individual contributor and engineering manager; however, I am now starting to think about what I need to do to land an executive leadership role.
I intend to switch this website to be more of a personal website aimed at executive leadership roles, with an archive of content as an example of my engineering competency and personal brand.
On that point, you might’ve noticed something different about my website.
I’ve finally moved from scottbrady91.com to the more professional scottbrady.io. I might blog a bit about the process involved in doing this in case anyone else finds themselves stuck on a dodgy domain name, but no promises.
I am no longer sure how to measure the success of my blog moving forward. It used to be traffic, which is a naïve and fickle metric to care about and doesn’t really do much other than inflate or, more often than not, deflate my ego. I suspect it will be more qualitative than quantitative, but if recent experience is anything to go by, the result is much more beneficial to my mental health and career.
In summary, I’m ready to put this blog down for a bit, and I’m ready to admit that. I’ve still got some new tools on the way, though.
Traffic
Let’s still look at the traffic vanity metric anyway, as I think sharing the slow decay of an unmaintained technical blog is useful for anyone worried about content upkeep.
The majority of traffic is going toward the online tools I’ve created, with the majority of technical articles continuing to age out. Some evergreen content has stayed relevant, but Google is obviously prioritising newer content over content that I have not updated in a few years.
I’ll still check out the traffic once a year or so, as I think it’s interesting to see what stays popular despite the lack of content updates.
Also, holy crap. It’s been 10 years of blogging!
Monetisation
With my blog’s shift in direction, monetisation is no longer a focus. Thankfully, the salary and benefits from my full-time employment continue to increase at a decent rate, so the fact that I’m finding little time for consultancy and my Pluralsight courses are also starting to age out is not a concern.
However, I am continuing to cash in on the reputational gains from this blog and my niche knowledge. That, combined with past speaking and consultancy experience, allows me to operate across an organisation with a strong engineering reputation and still receive job offers due to that reputation.
2024 in pictures
A snapshot of William’s favourite TV shows over 2024 – because these are a huge part of my life, and their theme tunes haunt my every waking moment. He’s not abandoned his love for 2023’s favourites, but they’re no longer on repeat.
Plans for 2025 and beyond
Like last year, I will use this as more of a snapshot of how I’m feeling and what I’m thinking about in terms of long-term goals and direction.
Weight loss and fitness
After an impulse Peloton purchase, I’ve managed to introduce some cardio in my life, which has seen a big change in my cardio fitness, and over the last 3 months, I have been consistently weightlifting using some basic body-building techniques. I was in a substantial calorie deficit across September and October and managed to lose 5kg after an early 2024 Tony’s chocolate obsession. I’ve been able to maintain this new weight relatively easily up until the usual Christmas binge. I’ve also been able to admit that I’m doing this for me.
I plan to ramp up the weightlifting with proper mesocycles in 2025 and keep up the calorie deficit until I can reach and maintain the sub-100kg weight that I’ve struggled to hit in the past.
Executive leadership roles
I’m looking to move into a CTO role within a 4 to 5-year timeframe once the sleepless nights with the new baby are over and my life has something that you could consider a routine again.
I’m working through some stigma around what a “proper” CTO role is, but my intention is to become a CTO of an established company, not a CTO of none or a CTO of a handful of engineering teams. Team size isn’t a good metric, but what I’m saying is I want something bigger than a CTO role that is basically the same as the entry-level Head of Engineering role I’m in now. That’s harsh, and I admit that it is not an entirely fair comment.
For 2025, I will retarget this website and social media profiles towards executive roles, try to understand the gaps in my knowledge/experience compared to established CTOs, and figure out what sort of CTO I want to or could be. I’ve done a bit of analysis on various MBAs and professional certifications, not necessarily with the naïve intention of doing them, but to understand their syllabus and what they see as important, the gaps in my own experience, and what I think I should focus on moving forward to address those gaps.
Release my OAuth testing tool
There, I’ve said what it is, so I’d better release it now. This is a project I work on each time I take any annual leave. It’s been “done” since last Christmas, but like any true hobby project, I keep changing the scope and have ended up building my own OAuth framework for .NET, which was surprisingly the easy bit. The hard bit was the user interaction and possible combinations of testing scenarios without accidentally creating an OAuth pentesting tool (or something more malicious). It’s been a great hobby project for trialling out different design and testing approaches, allowing me to continue forming my own opinions on various software engineering approaches that my day job otherwise doesn’t allow for. I would work on it more, but while I find it easy to context switch at work, I find it very hard when it is between my day job and personal side projects.
Till next time – Happy New Year!