Today is my last day at Heroku – I’m passing on the torch of workplace memelord and shitposter to all the cool people still doing cool things there! This was simultaneously a very easy and a very difficult decision – easy because the path is clear, difficult because, well, of course, leaving is difficult. I did a lot of introspection and spoke to a lot of insightful friends. One friend asked a question that clicked everything into place for me: did you finish telling the story you wanted to tell? I sat on that and thought deep and hard about it, and I decided I did.
Towards the end of my stay, a fellow engineer said to me in a watercooler chat: “When you first joined, I saw what you looked like and thought to myself – this is going to be interesting. Then I saw your technical work and your presentations – I changed my mind, wow you really know what you’re doing! I really respect the different perspectives you bring, you’ve really changed my mind.”
As you can imagine, it was a pretty awkward moment for everyone in the chat as they waited for me to react. On my part though – I thought it was incredibly brave and authentic of my coworker. I thanked him. What he said wasn’t anything shocking – many thought it, but he said it out loud. That authenticity and courage, and willingness to change his mind – that was incredible.
So, similar sentiments from him and others expressed to me in various settings consolidated this validation for me: yes, I have told the story I wanted to tell at Heroku, and it was a good one. I was able to tell that story because Heroku is a special place full of cool people. Looking back, I am so grateful for the trust I was given to spin up and carry out large-scale transformative projects, to inherit critical legacy systems, to be given the autonomy for impactful architectural and process decisions, to build a team from scratch, to create its charter, agreement, and vision, to collaborate with Heroku teams and Salesforce security teams. These are opportunities of privilege, I am so proud of the work I did with my team, and I am so grateful for the space I was given to make an impact.
I am also full of gratitude for the psychological safety I felt, I had fun at work, I was authentically me and it made work enjoyable. Naming a greenfield service uwu in 2022 and presenting it with a deck named “The Great Uwuification of Heroku'', using the naming to gently call-in our culturally appropriative naming traditions may have been my career shitposting high point. Heroku was a place that empowered me to carry out meaningful technical and cultural transformations like this.
With the services I operated and built, the technical papers I wrote and presented, and the cool people I met and befriended – Heroku has let me tell this chapter of my story: that you can be authentic at work, that you can have fun but be technically rigorous at the same time, that security is not just a checklist, that maintainability isn’t just a dream, that observability can be done inside-out and outside-in, that event-driven architecture can bring so much value to a legacy system, that on-call shouldn’t just be unaddressed suffering, that we don’t have to pit our solutions against each other, that we can solve problems together.
I’m now ready to move on to the next chapter of my story! First thing up, this weekend I will be getting married to my long-distance partner, co-mentor, and best friend. I will then spend some time in China to take care of some personal business – my grandmother passed away in 2022, and I was too caught up with work to handle the inheritance affairs. I have been doing more tech things for my own life, I have been doing more art and writing. My personal backlog has stagnated for a while, so I will be taking the next few months off to handle them one by one.
Quitting without an offer in this market is my decision to prioritize forward momentum by taking a step back. Sometimes a pause and reorientation is the best way to ensure we are going the right direction. I offer a unique set of skills that combines enterprise and start-up experience, infra and product engineering, technical and human-centric platformization across application, security, and compliance. When I’ve dealt with my personal backlog, there will be teams that would benefit from my help with these skills. Grateful to friends who have spoken to me about these needs in the last few months and shared job opportunities, grateful for all the good places where good people can do good work.
This will be the first break I am taking in adulthood and single parenthood. It feels like I have been sprinting and running and building – now I get to be happy with what I’ve made, and I get to take a break. I’m so pumped to solve my next set of technical problems, my brain is bored and ready for challenges – I’m aching to read and write code, I’m pining for an architecture thing I can jump on, but I know more rest will make that next step more fun!
So, I leave with you the meme I made for my Heroku buds on my last day – here’s the thing, work can and should be fun and meaningful, we all must work, so why not have fun and meaning? Here’s to the next chapter, and cheers to transformation in all shapes and forms!
