I was artsy when I grew up. I loved creating. When I discovered the power of software engineering and the Web in its infancy, I knew I needed to keep creating in this new medium.

I started my career as a software developer before the dotcom boom. I was in college when the Web was becoming known among techies, and I got interested in it, to say the least. I learned how to create HTML pages first, and when Apache started to support CGI, I started building dynamic pages using C/C++.

This got me a great internship, which turned into a full-time job after college. I've always loved learning, and technology threw more stuff at me than I could ever learn. But I took on the challenge, and I haven't stopped since.

Over the years (ehem, decades), I've been in individual contributor roles and/or leadership roles. This has given me opportunities to look at the same problems from different points of view.

My first engineering management experience told me to go back to being an individual contributor for longer. When I started to take on leadership roles again, I was more mature.

Over the following years I've come to love people management and engineering leadership. I discovered that management and leadership were not boring, devoid of learning opportunities. On the contrary, I learned that they opened so many domains and dimensions to leaders who were hungry to become better.

And I've been at it since as a life-long learner.