Ending an Era on a high note. 21 April 2012

I am parting ways with my current employer, the inimitable Development Seed at the end of April.

They came into my life, in much the same way as a white knight, shortly after my Raincity Studios failed. I had built the core of the Aegir hosting system at Raincity, but the project still needed a lot of work to live up to it’s potential.

I had spent about 5 months without a reliable income working on the project, at the time Devseed contacted me. They had heard I wasn’t able to make it to Drupalcon DC, they immediately offered to put up the money for my flight. I evaluated a couple employment opportunityes at the conference, but near the end Eric offered me something I couldn’t refuse.

A golden ticket

I joined them on what was going to be a 3 month ‘grant’ to focus the Aegir project, but as we worked more closely together, we ended up extending that initial arrangement to indefinite employment. They had the foresight and pluck to hire me to build something amazing, even though it didn’t contribute directly to the bottom line.

They didn’t need Aegir when I joined them, but they understood it’s value and believed that it should exist. That took vision, and I will always be grateful for that.

Out with the old …

I was also incredibly grateful and fortunate to be part of the company as we pivoted from being a Drupal oriented services company, to a pretty amazing node.js oriented product company. I could not have wished for a more stimulating and enriching environment on this journey. We were all on this journey together, and it made all the difference in the world.

Looking back at all the amazing projects I have helped them build over the last 18 months (since we pivoted), and knowing that I wasn’t even involved in all or most of them, has only increased my respect and admiration for the team at Development Seed. A lot of people are just getting over the hump of getting their first or second node-based sites into production, but they have accomplished so much more.

In with the new!

In the last couple weeks I have built this website for myself and more specifically an online portfolio to ‘show off my wares’ as it were. I’ve also been given permission to start republishing my old (nonsensitive) devlogs here. I was amazed at how much I have personally learnt in that time.

I have my next job already lined up, and It’s at a stealth startup in the valley. I start on the first of May. We are going to be building something rather spectacular involving industrial psychology and statistical analysis. I’m going to be bridging node into R (which is what the statisticians we employ will be generating), and doing many other fascinating things with a really interesting dataset.

The thing I am most excited about is the opportunity to build something completely new, from the ground up. For once I won’t have anyone else’s legacy systems to maintain, and the position gives me enough autonomy that i can have real investment in my work. It also gives me an amazing platform to learn more about data and analytics, which is something I have been dying to do.

I have only the best memories and sincerest wishes for Development Seed, and i hope they take the time to enjoy the success they have worked so hard for.