Yes the title of this post doesn’t hide that I’m about to dive into a short story of some sort… and yes as a child I tended to take my Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein tales with much seriousness.
These last few months I’ve been struggling for excitement and passion at work. I came to several realizations, some not so pretty about why I felt stuck. In the interest of not spilling tea about my soon-to-be previous employer, I’ll simply say the goals of the organization and mine diverged (Shifting Sands) and have continued to follow different paths. There were of course many good experiences, I just realized my time to leave had come.
I followed the advice of several people (after brief conversations on twitter: James Bach, Chris McMahon, and Lisa Crispin to name a few) and created a syllabus to guide my learning. Part of this self imposed syllabus included pushing myself to reach out into the professional amphitheater and start gathering experiences and learning from my peers. This has included attending conferences, uncons, after work meetups, and anything else that I could toss myself into. Of the conferences I attended, GTAC was by far one of the most influential for me. There was a lot of mad-technical-geekery as there should be but what struck me was the level of passion.
After stepping into the convention center I was at once immersed into one of the most passionate-hotspot nests of technology centric people I’ve ever met. When I say impassioned, these were not your typical simple get-thy-geek-on types but expanded to include a passion for how internal development processes impact the end users and reflect how the dynamics of the teams are impacted. The types of people who want to talk about optimizing process, discussing what seems to work and what has failed… the type of people who have an innate thirst for knowledge and are driven by that curiosity to explore. In short these were my types of people and to shorten the story even further it turned out I was their kind of people too.
Post conference I had a wild ride of strange luck and landed multiple interviews with interesting places and interesting people (Opera, Google, Amazon, Mozilla, to name a few).
With that, I’d like to announce that I’ve accepted a QA Engineering position with Mozilla! I’m very excited to start this new adventure come January 31st, 2011. I truly look forward to working with an incredible group of people who work on projects that make significant contributions to millions of peoples lives.