Comfort zone

Everyone deserves a break some time, especially if your daily work is very intense, as it was at Scalefast.

It has been a roller coaster since I have started working for them.

It is where I have learned most of my security skills, and where I have developed nearly all of my relevant tech skills. From Golang to architecting systems, to implementing secret store products such as Hashicorp Vault for a productive application, to taking analysis-based decisions on security.

I have enjoyed all of my time there, but it seems that a new chapter of my professional life is approaching slowly and surely.

Scalefast was bought by ESW about a year ago, and since the purchase, we have not had a lot of news, it was business as usual for most part of last year, but around mid December, things changed. A new CEO was hired, and his priority was to make ESW go public, and to do so, Scalefast (A part of ESW) had to merge with ESW, and become profitable. Since then, all our duties stopped. One day my priority was to integrate Gatekeeper to our Kubernetes cluster, and the next, it was nothing at all. Immediately I started feeling anxious, I guess it’s what happens when you can’t dedicate a large part of your brain power to a particular topic, and I started to fiddle around, looking for things to do. I also realized the intensity I was operating (Not just me, it’s a part of the Scalefast culture) was not normal, and I started relaxing a bit more, and more.

The whole process of winding down took like a month, and by the start of February, I decided I had to do something with the time I was given, so I started preparing for the CKS certification.

Right now, I’m in the middle of preparing myself for the CKS certification, and this is a reminder, that even though things wind down and I have more and more time to learn, it is human nature to become accustomed to this gift, and take it as a blessing, thinking I can “live the dream”, be payed and not do a lot.

Let me remind myself, this is not my path. The comfort zone is a wonderful place to be, but one should only stay a small amount of time there, just enough to marvel at how much it has grown since the last time you where there, stay a little bit longer, and you take the risk of becoming complacent, and not reaching you full potential.

And we don’t want that.