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Thaison Le

— 5 min read

TLDR: My name is Thaison Le, and I'm a engineer who deeply likes to learn. About anything and everything. I work as a software engineer that is currently interested and focused on building large systems, both on-site and in the cloud. My goal is to become an a solid Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), as this is what I'm most interested in and aligns with my goals. I have mainly built web application systems, but soon I will build many more types of projects. Stay tuned. I like building things that have impact.

I'll be mostly talking about my path as a software engineer underneath, but I'll leave links to other pages where I tangent off into a different idea.

What kind of learner am I?

I say engineer because while I'm a software engineer by trade, I wouldn't really restrict my learning to just code.

I get pulled into anything and everything that sparks my curiosity, whether that be physics, mathematics, robotics, or other domains of engineering. This fact is not limited to the "intellectual" sciences either. The biomechanics of rock climbing, the science of cooking, the domain of game theory as it relates to video games, etc. Everything is fair game.

All of these are rich fields are rabbit holes you can dive your whole life into. Additionally—and my own experiences back this idea as I learn more and more—I find that everything in life is interconnected in many ways. Sounds like spiritual woowoo when I say it, but really no field is completely disconnected from other fields. It gives the feeling of an underlying framework, like the "code" of life. And plucking on those strands brings me a lot of joy. That's why as an engineer, I make some time to learn about anything interesting, which may help me as a software engineer in the future.

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By the way, I just used an em dash in my previous paragraph. There's a common idea going around though that because no one uses em dashes, its a sign of AI writing. However, this blog is 99% organic. I also unfortunately really like em dashes, so I will use them in this blog.

Where did I learn?

I'm a college graduate hailing from the school of New York University, from great city of New York, in the state of New York.

What kind of software engineer am I?

I like to build projects that affect others, and the way I do that is by building software that has

1) Reach, at the very least globally

2) The ability to make someone's day a little bit better, a little bit easier.

These two key principles defined which projects I took part of in during school. My largest projects included an app that made our school library more accessible to the community, a robot that to clean the community, as well as publishing a paper for ML endoscopic surgery. Full list of my projects here.

These days, I'm more focused on building large scale web projects. I do this by building on top of cloud infrastructure, with either distributed or monolithic systems, that allows me to wield the power of the internet and reach the people I want.

— Shaping myself as an engineer —

I would call myself T-shaped software engineer in progress. It probably looks more like ┬┬ right now.

Coined by the David Guest in the early 90s, a T-shaped engineer is someone who's both well rounded but has a focus in certain areas.

I think the main way, and arguably the best way to get a job currently, is to specialize and be an I shaped engineer at first, then slowly expand later. Our job market favors specialized engineers greatly, as tech companies have matured so much that they need engineers to do specific roles.

However, I decided to be a ﹋ shaped engineer first. Basically I dabbled in all kinds of fields, whether that be system administration, robotics, machine learning, web dev, app development, mathematics, etc. I think that definitely hampered me at first, where the environment of everyone rushing for a job at a nice company definitely felt like I was behind.

Comparison is the thief of joy though and what I realized was that my wide range of experience helped me accelerate and excel at picking up new ideas. Everything fit nicely like building blocks on my foundation. I think, although slow at the start, I am a more well rounded engineer.

— Time to specialize into a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) —

Now I'm focused on systems, web, and cloud technology. I enjoy these the most out of everything I've done because one, it aligns with my goals perfectly of reaching and helping people, and two, my skills of combining a wide breadth of knowledge actually help me a lot here. You really do need to know a lot of knowledge for these fields. This led me to wanting to be an SRE as a profession, and I will continue to strive towards this goal. Click here if you want learn more about my SRE journey.

With everything I've explored, I can be very confident that this is the path I want to take. I'm finally ready to focus and strive towards that T-shaped engineer status.

Why make this blog now?

I have thought of making a blog many times before. Each time, there would be some excuse to it.

  • I don't have enough knowledge to write about anything cool
  • I have to code my entire blog from scratch, just like a real programmer, but that'll take a lot of time and knowledge
  • I don't have time to maintain it. I should focus on other things
  • What's the point? Everything I have or will ever write will have already be written by other people
  • I wouldn't like to spend my time writing anyways. It'd be more fun to just code

Some of these points were valid. But in the end, I started this blog because I wanted to start sharing some of the projects I did in a more human like way. And boy do we need that, where in a world of bots, humanity seems to be a rare find these days. But during the creation of this blog, I realized that all the points were either moot or missing the point.

That last point actually was changed for me by a very cool poetry course I took in college. Free writing is actually quite enjoyable and everyone should at least give it a shot. I will probably write a post about it someday.

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