Posted by Shane Becker on
At the end of 2010, I quit AT&T Interactive. I wrote a goodbye email to co-workers and friends at the company. I published that goodbye letter here on this site. Continuing this theme, my time at Engine Yard ended at the end of 2011. I wrote a goodbye letter to them too. Here it is.
My dearest Engine Yarders.
This time last year, I had just quit working at AT&T Interactive vowing to never work for anyone else again. Instead, I would finally take My Dreams™ off the back burner to take a shot at them. Shortly there after, I got seduced by VMware to help them launch Cloud Foundry. After just a few minutes there, I re-remembered that me and BIG companies don’t mix.
And then there was Dr Nic. He gave me what I had tried to get for years: working on Rubinius evangelism. For the past several months, we’ve succeeded at raising the profile of rbx in the Ruby community from an interesting toy project to a serious contender that everyone’s talking about. When Rubinius 2.0 drops, it’ll really shake the Ruby world up.
Evan and Brian are the real reason that Rubinius is as awesome as it is. I just got to tell people about it. On top of everything else, I’m super grateful for the support from EY to give users, fans and friends so many and such quality shirts and stickers. Everyone always loves them so.
Same goes for all the JRuby swag. Really quality stuff. Several times people told me that these were the best shirts they owned. Not bad, Engine Yard. Not bad at all.
I’m especially stoked that JRuby and Rubinius are first class citizens in EY stack. Kudos to everyone that played a role in making that happen, both socially in the company and technically in the infrastructure.
So, it’s the end of another solar revolution starting from some arbitrary point in linear time. It’s when we get all kinds of self reflective and make bold proclamations about who we are, who we’ll become and what we’ll do with the next revolution.
Here’s mine:
No more work on other people’s dreams at the expense of my own.
To that end, I’ll be spending the next foreseeable future working on:
If you know about those things, cool. If not, I’ll tell you offline or in person if you care to know. Both are software projects focused on data ownership.
Also, I’m starting an open source organization with a few others called:
Open Source Offsets. Its purpose will be to raise money to hire people to work on open source projects full-time. I’m excited. More about that soon.
Twenty eleven has been a kind of crazy year.
Twenty twelve is going to be totally amazeballs.
There are so many super smart and incredibly talented people at EY. I wish you all the best, as a company and as individuals. As friends are made and lost I always look back smiling never moved by struggle fate or cost.
I’m forever reachable at:
(801) 898-9481
veganstraightedge@gmail.com
https://veganstraightedge.com
@veganstraightedgeDon’t be a stranger.
XOXO SB