I joined Pure Storage in the beginning of last year, and felt like it was one of the best year of my life, for numerous reasons:
- Learning to live outside “the Google bubble”
- Meeting a bunch of interesting, smart people
- Learning a whole bunch of new tools and ways of thinking
- Getting a a good feel for the different tradeoffs involved in a small-vs-large place (eye opening!)
About a year and a half later, something else came along that I felt unable to pass up, and as of next week I’ll be joining the team at Confluent.
There are a few things that are interesting to me:
- A focus on Distributed systems
- The potential for event-streaming as a transformative force for all digital businesses, not just the likes of Uber and Twitter
- An impressive team that I met both during interviews and after
- A sweet spot in terms of engineering size and focus (no longer a small startup, but still having a lot of room to grow)
- A new challenge for me: a while new ecosystem to learn and master (!)
Of course, all these reasons are “after the fact”; the real motivation ultimately comes (for me, at least) from some sort of “gut feeling” that I get when I meet new people.
I felt this feeling when I first met a few people at Pure, and I felt it again at Confluent, and I gave to trust in it, and that I’m doing the right thing right now …
Making a change like this is new for me, because I’m not accustomed to ever changing anything when I’m happy (always sticking around until something makes me really unhappy) —— I will greatly miss everyone that I’ve worked with or talked to at Pure, as well as the managers who supported me, and I do hope we can stay in touch and work together again some day …
… but for now, I’m looking ahead with nervous excitement to the start of a new adventure.
Abacus Noir 