BoxBoat Blog
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My First Week as a BoxBoat Solutions Architect
by Aaron Walker | Wednesday, Oct 6, 2021 | BoxBoat
Hello, my name is Aaron Walker and I recently joined BoxBoat as a Solutions Architect. I wanted to give you some insight into the question, “what is your first week at BoxBoat like?"
After being offered my Solutions Architect position, I wanted to interview some current BoxBoaters. Many BoxBoaters, including myself, have goals that stretch far beyond the boundaries of our roles. I wanted to hear from folks directly on how BoxBoat leadership helped them achieve those goals.
I'm glad that I spoke to those people, particularly Forester and Jess, two BoxBoat Solutions Architects.
Forester, who wrote the Day in the Life of a Solutions Architect article, and Jess, another Solutions Architect, gave concrete examples of opportunities and projects that leadership created and/or allowed them to pursue. As an engineer, this is extremely important to me.
Knowing that BoxBoat is willing to put resources towards fostering my ambitions and career goals gave me the confidence to accept this position at BoxBoat.
Fast-forward to day one. Fresh cup of coffee. Favorite shirt donned. Desk cleared and wiped spotless. I even took some advice from the BoxBoat team's work from home tips and added some plants to my workspace.
I looked good, felt good, and was ready to meet my new coworkers. Onboarding was essentially completing a list of well-documented tasks listed in a Confluence page. Plus meeting everyone on Slack. Seriously, lots of warm welcome slack messages. After a quick orientation, I was able to wrap up my tasks by the second day.
At end of the first day, I had a meeting with the Engineering Manager, Dan. Like most of my favorite meetings, it was mostly small talk, but we did manage to squeeze in some time for next steps. Most engineers spend their first couple of weeks training or preparing for certification exams (such as the CKA or GitLab PSE).
I was tasked with obtaining a Kubernetes and Cloud certification. Sweet!
However, for better or worse, Dan put me on a customer engagement in my first week and I accidentally/indirectly volunteered to write this blog post. I found myself with a lot on my plate, so I immediately signed up for the CKA exam on Monday and the AWS CSA exam the following weekend so that I could get them out of the way quickly. I ended up writing this article a week later so I could focus on my customer project.
Later in the week, I met with my BoxBuddy and I also met the team in our weekly Engineering meeting.
Your BoxBuddy is a person who ensures that you become familiar and comfortable within the BoxBoat community and are your “no stupid questions” point of contact. Most importantly, they provide the inside knowledge on the best Slack channels such as #angryengineeringlifeisterrible, #dogsofboxboat, #gaming, #homelab, and #investing.
In the weekly Engineering meeting, I introduced myself to the team and spent the rest of the hour trying to balance my focus on the meeting and random technical conversations in the chat, such as the progress of Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.
Overall, my first impressions of BoxBoat have been very positive. BoxBoaters are smart. BoxBoaters are confident. BoxBoaters are proud to be BoxBoaters. Above all, BoxBoaters trust in each other's capabilities and are always eager to learn from each other. I'm very happy to have joined BoxBoat and excited for what the future holds!
