The origin of Falling leftwards
So Falling leftwards as an Idea has come about as I wanted a place to discuss the observations and experiences I made in the course of my life in tech.
The phrase itself was coined by a colleague of mine in describing what both he and I had gone through. Because there is no straightforward reason why either of us ended up in IT the way we have. To use myself as an example, by training I am a Health research methodologist and statistician. That is to say, I am concerned with how we perform medical research. My entry into technology was my work as a statistician. I started programming to improve my work as a statistician but soon found my primary job to be statistical programming. I had fallen to the left.
In technology, we often talk about shift right, as the action of moving something closer to the end user. In contrast, falling to the left is the process by which end users become more and more involved with IT and are working on creating the things they used to consume.
It is the experience of both me and my colleague that the act of falling to the left often isn’t a cautious decision. but something that happens by accident, or by surprise.
Who am I
My name is Simen, and as I say used to be a medical methodologist. After having fallen to the left a couple of times I have gone through statistical programming, Data Scientist, Data Engineer, Team/Tech lead for a team of Data engineers, to now being a Platform engineer using tools like Terraform, Yaml and Kubernetes to build a data platform that other Data Engineers and data scientists use to do the things I used to do.
What to expect here
In this blog, I am posting observations I make in the world of technology. Share thoughts on trends, and events. As a methodologist, I am interested in how we work, and how to improve our work. I plan to publish the findings here, and thoughts.
I am also interested in how to create data platforms, and data science work, and will be publishing on these topics.
Anything you read here, unless otherwise stated, is my own and only my own, and not affiliated, with whatever workplace I am affiliated with at any given moment.