On Unprompted Curiosity
This week I was looking at a Kubernetes deployment and noticed one of the containers was 1.7GB. Nobody asked me to look at container sizes. It wasn't on a sprint board. But 1.7GB is wrong, and I wanted to know why. So I dug in, found the problem, and now there's something concrete to fix. Nothing remarkable about it, but a lot of moments like that add up over a career.
In my experience, the people who end up driving the direction of their teams are the ones who read source code they didn't need to read, build things nobody requested, and ask "why" past the point where it's strictly necessary. The people who do what's asked, do it well, and clock out have perfectly fine careers - they're just not the ones who end up shaping where things go.
This isn't about working more hours or working for free. The difference is whether you see a 1.7GB container and think "that's not my problem" or "that can't be right." The second response might take thirty minutes, but it can save your team hours of deploy time, bandwidth, and cost every day.
Every time I've dug into something unprompted, I've learned how a system actually works - not just the surface I interact with for assigned tasks. To me, that accumulated context is what makes someone senior, more than years on a resume.
People frame passion as this big, dramatic thing. You're supposed to love what you do every day, feel called to your work, whatever. I think that's mostly nonsense. Passion, in practice, looks like not being able to leave a weird log message alone, or reading the docs for a tool you don't use yet because you saw it mentioned in a PR. It's not glamorous, but it's the thing that compounds.
I don't have a clean takeaway for this. Most of the useful things I've learned in my career came from poking at something I wasn't asked to poke at, and the Kubernetes container this week was just the latest one.