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2025-01-055 min read

From IT Analyst to Software Engineer: My Career Path

How I progressed from IT operations to building distributed systems. Lessons on growth, ownership, and technical depth.

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Starting in IT Operations

I started as an IT Analyst at Dyer & Blair Investment Bank. My job was keeping systems running for 200+ staff. I learned two things that shaped my career:

  • Automation is the highest ROI work. I automated 40% of routine tasks, saving 15+ hours weekly. This taught me that writing scripts to do repetitive work is always worth the investment.
  • Reliability is everything. Maintaining 99.5% uptime taught me that systems fail, and how you handle failure defines you as an engineer.

    • Moving to Web Development

    At BSystems Kenya, I moved to web development. The biggest shift was going from "keep it running" to "build it right." I learned:

    • Architecture matters. Leading the monolith to microservices migration taught me that architecture decisions have long-term consequences.

    • Mentorship multiplies impact. Mentoring 5+ junior engineers reduced vulnerabilities by 20%. Teaching others is the fastest way to deepen your own understanding.

    • CI/CD is not optional. Automating deployment pipelines reduced our delivery cycle by 40%. Manual deployments are a liability.

    Building Distributed Systems

    At Evenezer Tech, I moved to building distributed systems for financial software. This is where my engineering skills matured:

    • Event-driven architecture. Building real-time notification systems with RabbitMQ and WebSockets taught me how to design for decoupling and scale.

    • Payment systems. Integrating M-Pesa, Stripe, and PayPal taught me about idempotency, failure handling, and the importance of the adapter pattern.

    • Performance optimization. Reducing latency by 60% through async processing taught me to measure before optimizing.

    Consulting on Spatial Data

    At ESRI Eastern Africa, I consulted on spatial data pipelines. This expanded my skills into:

    • GIS and spatial data. Working with 40 million spatial records taught me about spatial indexing, branched versioning, and cross-platform data sync.

    • ETL pipeline design. Building automated pipelines with audit tables and validation checkpoints taught me about data integrity at scale.

    Lessons

  • Own your work end-to-end. The engineers who stand out are the ones who take a problem from ambiguity to shipped system.
  • Measure your impact. "I reduced latency by 60%" is more powerful than "I worked on the API."
  • Automate everything. If you do it twice, automate it. If you do it three times, you are late.
  • Mentor and be mentored. Teaching others is the best way to learn. Being mentored is the best way to grow.
  • Design for failure. Systems fail. How you handle failure is what makes you a senior engineer.
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