Last week I finished up at Culture Amp, and I’m excited to announce that I’ll be joining Buildkite as an engineer!
My time at Culture Amp was special. It was my first role after a decade of running Icelab with Max and Michael. Culture Amp hired everyone at Icelab after we decided to close the business, providing both a smooth transition and new opportunities to a singular group. I built a great working relationship with my manager, I was trusted to do big things, and I relished the chance to work with and learn from a large group of engineers. I’m deeply thankful for all of this.
Towards the end, I was serving as Culture Amp’s Director of Back End Engineering, and moving into engineering management. However, as any astute reader of this blog might attest, I am deeply motivated by hands on programming work, and all the learning and collaboration opportunities that go with it. I realised it was not the time to draw that chapter to a close (it might never!), and through that consideration I connected with Buildkite.
I’m excited to join Buildkite for many reasons! It’s a great Australian company with heart and personality. It brims with people I’ve long dreamt of working with. Developer tooling is an area close to my heart. And they’re growing a (majestic) Ruby app at the core of their tech. I can’t wait to dig in.
For me, this is also an intentional decision to stick with Ruby. The work I’m doing in Ruby OSS right now might be one of the biggest “dents in the universe” I get to make. I want to see this effort through, to complete our vision for Hanami 2.0, then learn from how it’s adopted by our community.
I have some time off between jobs, which I’ll use to give our Hanami work a real boost: I’ll be commiting nearly 6 weeks of full-time work to Hanami! Based on previous experience, this should see me get through what otherwise might have taken 6 months of part-time effort. I’m hoping this will get us significantly closer to 2.0. I’ll likely start another tweet thread of my efforts, so find me on Twitter if you’d like to follow along!