Purposeful Change
by bear
Spend more than a couple of days around me in a work setting and you will surely hear me say “purposeful” or “mindful” when talking about making decisions or choices. I use the phrase to help others work through the multiple choices that are available so they can select the one that works for them in the moment they are currently in.
This is not necessarily the best choice or the popular choice.
Two weeks ago I was layed off from &yet because the management team made the choice to stop trying to develop a product (which is why I was hired, to help on the Operations side of that decision) and refocus on their core skills. For a couple of days I went thru the normal emotional swings that anyone leaving a wonderful and amazing team like &yet has, and worked to change my thoughts and actions back to what I wanted instead of what my now former team needed.
The past few years saw me move even more from a more hands-on Ops focus to managing the Ops team and then onto managing the development team in order to help them keep maximum productivity and focus on the billable hours – which for consultants is the crank that needs to be turned continuously. The &yet developers all were such a joy to work with and were so understanding when I tripped-up or flubbed the myriad of small things that any fast moving team has to track.
All of the above came into my mind as I started to figure out what could be next for me.
I had already started to receive emails and pings from friends and peers about possible options but one quickly rose to the top of my mind as it was from a former OSAF (Open Source Applications Foundation) co-worker Travis (@tvachon) asking if I would be interested in joining the company he was currently at: Circle CI. The timing of his ping was a couple of days before I was layed off, so my reply was a quick “nope, very happy here, but thanks!” which is funny and odd only because that is also what happened six years ago at OSAF! At that time I had been approached by the CTO of Seesmic during my holiday time in 2009 because of some bugs I found in the XMPP server he had setup; had replied “nope, very happy here, but thanks!” and the very next week all of the OSAF team was layed off…
Two events does not a pattern make, but still very interesting :)
I reached out to Travis asking for more information and after the interviews, meetings and three days of on-site work with the SRE Team I was offered a position!
The challenges and work being done by the Circle CI team is, in my mind, at the cutting edge of the Continuous Delivery realm. This is exciting to me because of my Build/Release roots but also for my Operations and Dev/Ops side – the meta conversation involved when your talking about continuously delivering a product that is used by a lot of folks to enable their own agile operations, is in it’s own right worthy of attention. Add on to that the directions and changes they are looking to make to enable future growth… OMGBBQ yea!
So while the path before me may have changed in direction, I don’t fear or worry because I know that I try to walk my path in a mindful way with an open mind to learning new things.