Becoming a Senior Engineer, The Third and Final Article

He did it and you can, too!

It has been years since I last updated my series on career growth for engineers. You can view the two original parts here and here, but I’ll summarize each as part of this third, and I think the final article on the subject (though I reserve the right to later change my mind).

These previous articles represented my own journey to date, and in attempting to summarize my observations and successes I found a large audience of people looking to do the same. This article is both a summary and extension, a synopsis and synthesis of my new experiences, now almost four years after I published the original article.

Cisco’s Always-On Commerce Renewals Platform

I had the opportunity to meet with Charulata Sharma, Senior Engineer, Cisco Systems to learn how they are using DataStax Enterprise to power the new Cisco Commerce Renewals platform, a faster and more intuitive e-commerce website that enables distributors, partners, resellers, and direct customers to quote, order, and manage service contracts and software subscriptions.

Cisco’s previous renewals platform, written years ago in Java with a relational database management system (RDBMS) backend, suffered from frequent and lengthy downtime and required significant person-hours for quarterly updates. Cisco needed a cloud-native compatible platform and a highly reliable database that was easy to migrate to, delivered fast searches, and supported an active-active data center model.