Ten Years at Clear Function

Today, September 1, marks ten years for me working at Clear Function. Prior to CF, the longest I had worked anywhere was 7 years, so this is a landmark for me.

Reflections on the past Decade at Work

I was joking with coworkers that, when I started at CF, I only had 2 kids and now I have 4! Obviously, number of children has nothing to do with my work, but it more shows just how much has changed in the last decade.

On the work side, Clear Function has been in two different offices with four different spaces. We went from largely in-person to a very hybrid model with half of our team being remote now. I still prefer working in the office most of the time, because I 1) find that I can focus better on work there and 2) I like hanging out with my coworkers! I do work from home when I need to, though, and that flexibility is a huge difference maker.

It would be hard to estimate how many clients and projects I’ve worked on in that period of time… the types of technologies has grown, but not as much as I might have thought. The biggest changes I’ve seen have honestly been on the frontend side, with projects ranging from old jQuery projects to modern React or Vue projects and everything in between. I’ve met new friends at various clients and I’m confident that most of them would love the opportunity to work with me again, in whatever fashion that might look like.

Reflections at Home

Like I said, life at home has changed a lot in the last ten years, too. Two of my children have been born since then, one is a teenager now and one is really close.

I started my fitness journey about 7 years ago and have now run at least 5 half marathons. I’m certainly healthier than I was when I started!

Reflections on Technology

Who would have thought that AI would have become so huge over this time? I remember trying out ChatGPT when it first went public and everyone had it make songs or whatever and were blown away by it to now we’re using Claude Code pretty regularly at work. I’m very much in a “love/hate” relationship with LLMs - I like that it can help with “busy-work” code and I hate what it is doing to college graduates. It shouldn’t surprise me that so many businesses are so short-sighted, though.

Wrapping Up

This is mostly been a meandering post, but I just wanted to drop some brief reflections. Back to hanging out with the kids on our day off!