It's something of a LaunchDarkly tradition to write a blog post at the end of your first week. But here I sit, deep into week number two, and I haven't written a thing. In my defense things move pretty fast around here, and I was just trying to keep my head above water. My second day on the job, having finally set everything up so I could start coding, they had me deploy production. By the time Friday rolled around, I had fixed 3 bugs, opened 6 pull requests, deployed production two more times -- and written zero blog posts. Better late than never though, right?
A new chapter
I'm extremely thrilled to be part of this great company. I joined LaunchDarkly after nearly 10 years at Atlassian, where I spent most of my time doing front-end development and arguing about UX. I'm excited to take everything I learned there and continue to make LaunchDarkly a product people love to use.
I took the job because I believed in the people, the product, and the culture. If anything I underestimated all of those things and I can't wait to see where this journey takes me.
An escape
The other day we went on a team outing to an escape room. If you're not familiar, you basically solve a series of puzzles using items in a room in order to "escape" the room. I've never done one before, so I have nothing to compare it to, but this particular escape room required a lot of coordinated effort. We had 12 people participating (almost the whole team, which is at 15 now), but at any given time there were probably 3-5 puzzles being worked on.
The beginning was a little chaotic as everyone tried to figure out exactly what we'd gotten ourselves into and what in the world to do next. But pretty soon we settled down, started self-organizing, and talking through the problems. It was pretty amazing to see everyone working together so well -- no arguments or drama, no jockeying for leadership, just good old-fashioned teamwork. I think that experience sums up my time at LaunchDarkly so far -- fast and fun, with a great group of people working together towards a common goal.
Oh yeah, and we escaped the room (just barely).
