Scaling A Tech Career Through Life-long Learning

In the latest episode of Stories from the Hackery, we talk with NSS alumnus Chris Miller, whose journey vividly illustrates the power of life-long learning. Chris's career has taken him from jazz composition and bass performance to becoming a critical part of the team streaming the Super Bowl for Tubi. As Chris himself says, "Every day I take a step forward," reflecting the mindset that has helped him tackle both personal and professional challenges.

A Creative Start in Music

Chris began his career in a fairly common place for NSS students—as a musician. Yet, what initially seemed unrelated to tech gave him a strong foundation for his software development career. " I give all of my credit in my success and pretty much every endeavor in my life into just the fact that as a kid, I had to learn how to practice something," Chris shares, highlighting the practice and discipline ingrained from his musical training. This mindset of constant improvement translated well to learning software development.

"Software development was the perfect combination of being fiscally responsible and doing the thing I really loved—collaborating with people to build something meaningful."

Growing In Tech

After graduating from NSS’s Full Stack Web Development Bootcamp with Cohort 22, Chris quickly found his footing in Nashville’s vibrant healthcare tech scene. His initial role at Aspire Health offered invaluable mentorship within a team largely composed of fellow NSS graduates. From there, he transitioned to CareBridge Health and was able to greenfield a new project. A couple of years later, Chris leveled up again with a position at HCA. Each role presented an entirely different set of challenges and deepened his technical expertise.

Taking on the Super Bowl with Tubi

At Tubi, Chris took on one of his most ambitious projects yet: scaling backend systems to handle the enormous traffic demands of streaming the Super Bowl. The scale was extraordinary—from an everyday peak of 10,000 requests per second to managing 250,000 during the event. Chris’s propensity to ask questions and investigate made him the right engineer for the task at hand. “ They were like, who's that guy who likes to do weird stuff? And looked at me over in my corner just trying to trace packets. And they were like, huh, I dunno. He might not know anything about CDNs, but he'll learn,” Chris recalls.

Facing uncharted territory at Tubi, Chris exemplified his relentless curiosity and meticulous problem-solving approach to deeply understand the entire system, emphasizing, "It's not about the code; it's about what the code solves."

The Role of Generative AI

When discussing the emerging influence of generative AI in software development, Chris maintains a critical yet balanced perspective. "They're tools—useful, but not replacements for the nuanced and creative work developers do." He emphasizes the ongoing importance of understanding problems deeply, cautioning against relying on generative AI for essential development tasks.

A Future Built on Learning

Looking ahead, Chris believes the most valuable skill in software development is a growth-oriented mindset. The field constantly evolves, and the ability to adapt, understand deeply, and solve complex problems will always outweigh mastery of any single tool or language.

Chris Miller’s journey from a music major to an essential player in streaming the Super Bowl illustrates the profound power of continuous learning and adaptability. For more of Chris's insights, tune into the full conversation on the Stories from the Hackery podcast.

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