Matt Oswalt

Matt is a Systems Engineer at Cloudflare, where he works on proxies and control plane systems. He blogs at https://oswalt.dev and occasionally posts on Twitter as @Mierdin.

I’m grateful to have been exposed to software development as well as infrastructure technologies such as networking at roughly the same time in my life. While I had toyed around with the BASIC-esque language on my TI-82 calculator in high school (okay, toyed is a stretch—I created a rudimentary Galaga clone while failing Geometry) and taken a single semester of programming in Visual Basic, it wasn’t until university that I first encountered Linux, networking, and a modern programming environment.

Over the next few years, I bounced back and forth between what seemed to be fairly isolated technical domains. Doing so often made me feel like a beginner in everything and an expert in nothing. I’ve had more than a few moments of anxiety, worrying that I’m not doing...