Engineering Spotlight: Tay Nishimura
Tay Nishimura’s career shows that succeeding in tech is often less about fitting a standard engineering mold and more about finding work that matches one’s strengths. Although she initially struggled with the speed and coding demands of software development, her rigor, visual thinking, and careful approach became valuable in site reliability engineering. Her transition was enabled by self-directed learning, community education, and ToyNet, an open source networking simulator that demonstrated her practical abilities. ## Entering Tech from Mathematics - Tay began as a mathematics major focused on real analysis, then added computer science after advice from a professor. - Internships at Amazon and Google introduced her to the technology industry. - She found a sharp contrast between academia and industry: - School rewarded theoretical rigor. - Industry emphasized practical, fast, and agile solutions. - Tay also felt like an outsider because she had little exposure to computers growing up. ## Struggling with Traditional Software Engineering - Coding did not come naturally to Tay’s visual way of thinking. - She translated code into drawings to understand and modify it, then converted those ideas back into code. - This process produced high-quality, careful work but made her slower than colleagues expected. - A manager suggested product management and site reliability engineering as possible alternatives. - Tay discovered that her deliberate pace was useful for SRE work, particularly when evaluating failure modes and making critical changes. - Because her company offered no path into those roles, she eventually left rather than continue facing increasing stress. ## Discovering Networking and Technical Program Work - Tay’s next role had a software engineer title but involved work closer to product or technical program management. - She learned that job titles and responsibilities vary significantly between companies. - With better work-life balance, she began studying computer networking in her free time. - She created visual diagrams and learning modules to explain switches, routers, and packet flows. - These efforts became Project Reclass, a nonprofit teaching technical skills to incarcerated people and military veterans. - The program used improvised equipment, such as fake routers and switches, to teach concepts in environments where real networking hardware was unavailable. ## Building ToyNet During the Pandemic - After her company laid off its entire office during COVID-19, Tay decided to pursue SRE directly. - When prisons suspended in-person education, Project Reclass adapted by creating a digital networking simulator. - Tay architected ToyNet, an open source platform built with: - React - A Flask backend - Containerized Mininet instances for network emulation - Users can connect simulated routers, switches, and hosts, configure IP addresses, and run commands such as `ping` and `arp`. - ToyNet was designed to work for incarcerated learners with restricted internet access. - Deploying it in the cloud also gave Tay practical experience that helped compensate for limited professional cloud experience. - Companies interested in the project were more likely to advance her through the interview process, eventually leading to Datadog. ## Finding the Right Environment at Datadog - At Datadog, Tay learned Kubernetes, chaos engineering, network traffic control, and Go. - She found that her rigor and visual thinking were assets rather than liabilities. - While learning Datadog’s Chaos Controller codebase, she mapped files and dependencies by drawing boxes and arrows. - Her experience suggests that engineers do not need to learn or reason in a single conventional way; the right environment can turn an apparent weakness into a strength. Tay’s path recommends experimenting broadly, studying independently, and building concrete projects that reveal how you think and solve problems. The most suitable tech role may emerge only after moving between companies and disciplines rather than forcing yourself to succeed in an ill-fitting position.
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