Time flies—it’s already 2025! Looking back, 2024 was an incredibly fast-paced year for me professionally as an Engineering Manager. This year, I’ve decided to take a new direction and return to a more engineering-focused role.

I moved in a management position early 2023. It was a time where my company was growing fast (from 20-ish to 60-ish), and we needed coordination to ship things out in parallel, but also to migrate customers (and ourselves!) to new datacenters. With my on-call experience, I helped our CTO, Steven, bootstrap two data-oriented teams and later led the Materia team, shaping its technology.

During this time, we successfully launched Materia KV in its Alpha version and built strong internal trust in FoundationDB. Our largest cluster effortlessly handles hundreds of thousands of writes per second, and the ability to simulate Rust code within FDB’s simulation framework has significantly boosted our developers' confidence.

Management is a rewarding challenge, like unlocking a new skill tree to walk through. Resources like The Manager's Path or Engineering Management for the Rest of Us can give you a head-start and should be read by anyone. Blogs like Charity Majors are also useful to read, especially The Engineer/Manager Pendulum and its follow-up.

After nearly two years, I feel it's the right time to return to core engineering. I just miss it. From the start, my manager and I had an understanding that I could transition back whenever I wanted to—and that time is now. I've found an excellent manager to lead the team, giving me the space to focus on the technical side of Materia. I also should have more time to work around open-source, and I'm looking forward to it.