jeffhui.net
It's a bittersweet end to a chapter. I've thoroughly enjoyed my time at Pivotal Labs. I met a lot of great friends. I paired and talked with geniuses and newcomers alike. And I'd recommend anyone with an opportunity to work at Labs to take it immediately.
I look back with great memories, shared termoil, and personal growth. As an introvert, it was a boundary-expanded endevor: pair programming every day. I learned the value of tests which is evident to most of the major open source work I've contributed to. I've sharpened my mind by the discussions I've had there.
Pivotal provided accelerated growth that I couldn't have receive from normal companies. Labs provides a unique way to learn on a wide range of skills in a few years:
- Learning professional software engineering for mobile and web development.
- How to run software teams.
- How to integrate design, engineers, and product together.
- What makes a good team?
- Testing in variety of contexts. Why test?
- Continuous delivery / integration.
- Software stacks.
- Sustainable software development.
- Teaching and explaining topics to both developers and non-developers.
Also, I learned about the people that create software:
- How people think and learn tools and languages.
- How processes can shape everyday behaviors.
- What can make people productive.
- Communicating well is a tough problem.
I thank everyone who I have had the chance to worked with. I thank you pair for letting me type (I love it a bit too much) and experiencing how much I fail at pressing the right buttons too. Please, keep in touch.
But it's time to experience startup life. I'll be joining Mayvenn working on Clojure full-time. The clojure community has been a place I have been stealing ideas from since Clojure was first released into the world. It's a special opportunity to use this language in anger. It's impossible to have a perfect langauge, but it doesn't hurt to expand to new forms of thought. That's for another article.
As a polyglot, I'm impartial to tying any individual programming language. I've tinkered from assembly to Ruby. But it's a great opportunity to learn from the community and tools that have inspired me a lot.
I will continue to contribute and watch the Apple community grow. But I'm stepping up to learn as much as functional programming has to offer in practice. And I'll likely spill it back over to this community.
And I'll definitely be writing more here, since I have less avenues to explain my thoughts on a more regular basis.