My last day at Engine Yard
Today is my last day at Engine Yard. It’s a cliché to say, but this definitely a bittersweet day.
I’ve been working here for almost a year. It’s a short time, I know, but it was still long enough for me to feel sad about leaving. I love the people I’ve worked with here. My teammates are some of the most incredibly smart Ruby developers I know (except Andrew and Jessica, who do design and front-end — but they’re very talented, too). Everyone on my team, past and present, are all hilarious, fun, awesome at hacky sack, and now that I’ve gotten to know them, I’d call them great friends.
Engine Yard is a fantastic company and I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with them. They’re super passionate about the open source Ruby community, and go out of their way to sponsor events, offer educational workshops and hack days, and of course they’re known for throwing a lot of money at opportunities to get developers really, really drunk.
One of the best things about my time here is that I’ve learned a ridiculous amount about the practices outside of the standard front-end development workflow I’m used to. I’d used Git before (in the pull-commit-push sense); now I know how to create my own branches, rebase, and merge. I even staged my own EY cloud that I could prototype with before I would deploy things to production. This was all scary stuff to learn at first as a designer, but now I feel like I’m a stronger designer and front-end developer going forward. I have so much to thank Engine Yard for.
So why am I leaving? Well, firstly, I wasn’t even looking to leave at all. I was pretty darn happy at Engine Yard and turning down recruiters left and right — and I would highly recommend anyone to go work here. But an opportunity came up, and well, it was just too good of an opportunity to turn down.
Because I feel like being a tease, I’ll wait until they announce my hiring (in their typical fashion) before I announce it on my own (though a few people already know). I will say I’m super excited and I look forward to the work I’ll be doing with them and the rad, talented people I’ll be working with. Look for a blog post on that soon…
In the meantime, Engine Yard is hiring. They have great compensation and benefits, lots of high-quality Scotch whisky, and a super rad rooftop penthouse in their San Francisco location. They also recently opened a sweet Portland office, too. So if you play a mean game of hacky sack (or would like to learn how to), and if you are a good programmer (even if in another language besides Ruby), send your test-driven code samples, your GitHub URL, links to any projects you’ve done (especially open source projects) to the VP of Engineering, Tammer Saleh (tsaleh@engineyard.com).
