One Year

A year ago today, I started at Approov. A hundred days in, I wrote about the transition: leaving management, the refreshing day-to-day feedback loop, the strange experience of relearning a craft I thought I'd lost. I stand by most of it. But a hundred days is enough to notice a change; it takes a year to understand it. So here is what a year taught me that a hundred days couldn't. The rust that mattered At a hundred days I called myself rusty. I was. I reached for patterns that no longer fit and looked up syntax I once knew by heart. I expected that to be the hard part. It wasn't. The rust came off faster than I feared, and somewhere along the way I realised I'd been worried about the wrong thing entirely. The agentic era arrived in earnest this year, and it quietly rewrote the job description. The premium skill is no longer how fast you can produce code from memory. It's whether you can write a precise specification and make a strong architectural decision, then judge honestly whether what comes back is any good. Those are not new skills for me. They are the exact skills that years of reviewing architecture and mentoring engineers had been sharpening the whole time. The craft I sat down to relearn was not the craft that turned out to matter. I spent years assuming management had pulled me away from engineering. It hadn't. It had been quietly preparing me for the version of engineering that was coming. Charity Majors has a name for the shape of this: the engineer/manager pendulum. The idea that a healthy career swings between the two, rather than treating management as a one-way door you walk through once and never come back. I didn't choose when mine swung back. But it swung the right way, and the years spent on the other side weren't lost. They were compounding. A secure transaction is a secure transaction The work itself has been a homecoming of a different kind. I spent years in payments. Now I work in mobile and API security. On paper those are different worlds