I am a second-generation programmer. My father worked as a systems analyst/programmer at a bank for many years. He was the guy they called in the middle of the night when something broke, even if he hadn’t been on that project for years. This is because he was not only smart but he was the kind of guy who answered the phone in the middle of the night.

Because of my father’s vocation, he bought the family a computer early on during the 1980s. My first computer was a Coleco Adam. I learned Logo and Basic. I would make “choose your own adventure”-style narratives using a few simple if statements and goto commands.

Fast-forward to college. It’s 1994 and I’m a freshman at the University of Washington, making a memorial website for all the cats in my life who had passed away. I still love cats and, yes, I can still be a little weird at times. I have no memory of learning HTML. I do remember resisting JavaScript for a while, as well as that crazy, barely-supported new technology, CSS. I learned a lot of good lessons during my early career but most of them were life lessons while the technical lessons are less relevant in today’s stacks. For example, I can cheerfully crimp ethernet cables, but we have Wi-Fi now and being a crimping champ is much less useful.

In 2000 or so, I worked with my husband as a private web applications consultant. I learned a lot about managing projects. I learned a lot about listening to stakeholders. I learned the value of a good “spike solution” in getting stakeholders’ imaginations going and discovering a clearer vision of what they want and need. Refining your project is not a bug and not a failure, it’s a strategic advantage. Don’t build what your product manager sketched out two years ago. Build a small version fast and grow the project through iterative refinement and discovery. Back in 2000, most people had never seen a web application and had little idea of the potential held in the simplistic stack we were using at the time.

In 2005, I graduated from the University of Washington with a Bachelors’ degree in Informatics. I had started college in 1994. It took 11 years to graduate. Life got in the way, mostly a lack of money on which to live let alone pay tuition. The first dotcom boom was happening in the late 1990s. My husband and I managed to make enough to afford a decent apartment. In those interim years, I worked full-time as a web developer and supported my husband while he finished his degree. We bought a small condo. I took my Informatics pre-reqs while very pregnant. We had a premature baby. By the time I graduated, I had a 3 year old, a husband with his own degree, no student loans, and a full-time job. We had a home where we were not underwater, and full-time work experience. It was unconventional to be sure and I don’t recommend it (especially getting married at 21 years old), but we made it work. Our motto was “we can do anything for ten weeks!”

Flash forward a few jobs to SSGCID. After intense, disabling morning sickness with our firstborn, I decided to stop working during pregnancy and stay home with our second child for the first year, as that was the age requirement for the daycare we loved. SSGCID was a miracle for me. I was able to work through those tumultuous first few years of daycare and the attendant illnesses without shame. I think it helped that SSGCID is, after all, the Seattle Structural Genomics Center for Infectious Disease. I was happily developing their custom Laboratory Information Management System which required getting familiar with project management as well as the science behind the protein production pipeline. Everyone around me was a biologist or scientist of some type and they were happy to teach and share whatever they could. I loved the community feeling of working closely with so many different types of people.

It was the third five-year government contract re-competition that created a massive budget contraction. Because I didn’t do the actual science, I was let go (otherwise, there would be no scientists to create scientific data to manage). It broke my heart but I saw the sense in what they were doing. Our project manager at the time (whom I adore), had repeated often enough in my presence that the budget kept getting smaller as negotiations went on. Thanks to her, I wasn’t surprised by the cut.

I moved on to Fred Hutch, again dazzled by science and hoping that this would be the “big time” and I would return to a demanding, multi-person team working on a large codebase together. In interviews, I can come off awkward and shy enough that it’s reasonable to believe that I don’t play well with others. Once acclimated, I do play well with others. However, I felt deeply divided from the majority of other people in the team and rarely saw my singular coworker contact. The technical challenge wasn’t there, either, and my skills eroded. It was a terrible fit and I don’t like to talk about it. I can say some positive things, I can see where I could have done better, been a better advocate for what I needed. But, most of all, it just didn’t feel good to go to work.

I left The Hutch, offering two weeks’ notice. They, like many people working with HIPAA sensitive data, decided they did not want to take advantage of my offer. I packed up and left the same day I gave notice. I do wish them the best. There were a lot of people that I liked. I wish them no harm.

I worked for myself for a while, which should be its own post. Soon, it was the pandemic and everything was upside down. I was straining at the edge of having developed something that I loved, but I wasn’t confident enough in my entrepreneurial skills to launch. The situation wasn’t pretty but through it I learned so many new and new-to-me technologies. I also learned more about my personal limitations at work and my sincere need for good colleagues to keep me focused and excited about a project.

In April of 2021 my old SSGCID manager got in touch with me. Seattle Childrens’ Research Institute had bought the old CIDR research institute lock, stock, and barrel. There was money now: money to bring me back on. This man literally said that letting me go was the worst thing he ever did. My job would have new AWS Cloud responsibilities, which I’d been working on already during my “sabbatical” following my exit at The Hutch.

Of course I was glad to accept the offer but, as my husband has pointed out: “You can’t have the same vacation twice.” It’s not the same. We all work from home all the time now, except for the bench scientists. There’s an eerie “Pet Semetary” feeling. Working in the cloud and doing the cloud migration is interesting, challenging, and maybe even fun. Childrens’ had lifted CIDR’s server infrastructure whole and confined it to a walled-off kingdom called “the VRF.” With the help of a very wonderful coworker, who reworked a lot of Python2 scripts into Python3 and reconstituted our Galaxy server, we managed to shrink at tangled web of some two dozen virtual machines into five instances on the AWS cloud. I’ll write more about that later, but for now, just know that it’s one of my favorite accomplishments.

And all this is coming to an end, whether death by partisan government or death by our Fearless Leader’s retirement. I find now that maintaining and upgrading the Laboratory Information Management System that I am solely responsible for to be bittersweet. Most of the upgrades now are “nice to haves” and not “mission critical.” The science is still going strong but I can’t put my head in the sand and pretend that SSGCID will compete for another five-year contract. Even if that happened, it would just be kicking the can down the road. I have responsibility to my family to set my focus on the near future and how to best move forward. For now, that involves being at peace with the ending of SSGCID and the need to start looking–slowly and selectively at first–for another opportunity.