Cade Loar.Product engineer

Reflections on My Time at STAX AI

Although my time at STAX AI was brief, I'm deeply grateful for every second of the journey. The past seven months as a software engineer there brought some of the most challenging yet rewarding experiences of my career so far.

This role was my first full-time position after graduating college, and I couldn't have asked for a better place to start. Jumping into a startup environment gave me the chance to collaborate closely with product, design, and solutions teams, contributing to meaningful features and improvements from day one.

One highlight was volunteering to help build a major feature that delivered significant value to our customers. What began as a chance to assist quickly grew into owning a large portion of the project. This experience taught me how to navigate the ups and downs of building technically complex features, integrating technologies like cloud micro-services, Docker containers, and Go APIs to create seamless front-end workflows.

I also learned just as much from the mistakes I made as from the successes. These moments strengthened my skills not only in software engineering but also in communication, teamwork, and project management.

Above all, I'm thankful for the talented colleagues who supported, challenged, and inspired me. My time at STAX AI reinforced my belief in the power of collaboration, innovation, and user-focused design, and I'm excited to carry these lessons into the next chapter of my career.

Big things coming soon...

"Happiness is the precursor to success, not merely the result..."

Just finished reading The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor, and it gave me a whole new perspective on success, motivation, and resilience. Here are a few insights that really stuck with me:

Key Insights

• The Losada Line: Positivity isn't just feel-good fluff. There's a tipping point where teams and individuals actually perform better. Teams that strive for a ratio of positive to negative interactions higher than 3:1 produce their best work.
• Social Investment: In times of stress or challenges, our instinct might be to retreat... but the happiest and most resilient people do the opposite. They lean into their relationships. Investing in social connections is one of the most powerful tools we have for performance and well-being.
• The Pygmalion Effect: When we believe in someone's potential (including our own), performance follows. Visualizing growth and believing in potential can rewire outcomes.

Many of us fall into the trap of thinking that we'll be happy when we get that next promotion, or graduate college, or a number of other reasons. But the truth is, happiness leads to success, not the other way around. This book helped me realize that the most productive and beneficial course of action I can take is to be proactive in seeking out happiness.

Choosing happiness now is actually an advantage... hence the title of the book. Happiness has been proven to make us more sharp, productive, and successful. The book provides several ideas for infusing everyday life with happiness.

For anyone looking for their next read, I highly recommend this one!