Quit my job
Sometimes it is simply time to go. Throwing yourself into your job is always a gamble. If you give everything you can, the potential for reward (inner purpose, not money) is huge. You can be part of forming something bigger than yourself, blazing a trail which others will eventually follow and end up with your dream job that you partly made happen. In the end however, companies have all sorts of external and internal pressures that push them in a certain direction and if you recognise that direction isn't for you then it is perhaps the right call to accept that and leave room for people who might be more able to get onboard with that direction.
Nonetheless it was an awesome, tiring, challenging, hilarious experience where I learned and benefited from the awesome teams we built as much as I hoped they got from me as Head of Engineering.
Things I am most proud of
- The people - when I joined as Interim CTO we were a dozen or so people with only a few internal engineers. Over the last 18 months I sourced, hired and grew 5 engineering teams with 20+ engineers. Not only were they all very talented they were all truly awesome people which was a criteria we held above all else.
- The platform - my hands on tech contribution was building our app development platform using advanced Kubernetes techniques to ensure every dev could iterate on their apps securely without restrictions. It truly felt like the last 5+ years of building products in the cloud culminated to our work here. In the end, any engineer could deploy an app from Github with around 10 lines of config.
- The engineering culture - Building medically certified apps is not exactly "fun". There are a tonne of regulations, rules, stakeholders etc. on top of the usual challenges of startups (low budgets, mixed experience levels etc.) Thanks to the people however we held onto a problem-solving, knowledge sharing culture so that the unknown never felt unachievable.