The past year and a half have been more than interesting. As part of that journey, the past 6 months have been spent at PagerDuty. While there I made a lot of new friends, solved interesting problems in creative ways, built some great professional relationships.  I also learned a lot, and discovered that the PagerDuty SaaS offering was far more powerful than I realized. Unfortunately the role with the Business Development team was not a fit. That being said, today I’m starting a new path.

I’m going to take a few months off from the work world and do a sabbatical leveraging resources like edX as well as do more coding and writing.  At a high level my plan is to take a few months to do some education in big data, machine learning and other areas where I’d like to gain some growth. I also am planning on doing some purposeful learning with big data and API work.  Also hoping to do more writing than I have been able to do during the past few months.

As part of that purposeful learning I’ll be enhancing a prior project around job board aggregation, recruiter CRM and filtering the noise. If you’ve looked for work in the last 12 months, are currently looking or will be looking in the next year, I’ve got a survey where I could really use your input.

So yes, this article is primarily announcing that next journey.  But I also have to give props to PagerDuty’s Solutions Consultant team (think Sales Engineering), Sales, PM and Engineering/Development teams as well as those team’s leadership. When I was at Fastly I thought I’d never find an SE team that great. PagerDuty was able to match that prior magic. Their leadership like Kyle Duffy and Kieran Galvin have a passion, skill set, emotional IQ and drive that reminds me of the folks at Fastly. People at Fastly like Chris Kruse, Stephen Basile, Mark Richards and Peter Wohlers have similar attributes and really set a high bar that I couldn’t fathom being matched.

If you are looking to take your SE, Sales, PM or Dev career to the next level, please reach out to me.  I’m happy to give you inside details of what both firms are like.   I also can make introductions to the relevant leadership. And if your team is looking for talent I’d like to highlight two people.  Both of which I have a lot of respect for that are either available or about to be available.

One is Michael Guimarin. I first met Michael when I interviewed at Fastly. At the time he was a Sales Engineer but soon transitioned into Sales. I was always impressed by his ability to succinctly explain technical concepts at an elevation his audience would understand. He said just enough and never more than was required to get his message across. And his ways of getting insight into a firm’s procurement processes really kept things efficient and moving forward properly. “Intelligent” is an understatement, and he learns as fast as anyone I have ever worked with.  His LinkedIn profile said that he’ll be looking for an Account Executive role in the SF Bay Area in the first quarter of 2019.

Another is Peter Wohlers. Peter was the VP of the Customer Engineering organization when I was at Fastly. He really understands the value and differentiation that the organization can bring to a firm. And he also was very direct in his take, open for discussion and allowed his team to get their job done. We were motivated and excited to be at Fastly and wanted to accomplish more and more. After all, he was so empathetic and attentive.  He very much cared about our development, but always thought about the customer first. I had lunch with him last week and he stated that after his current time off he’s about to start looking for something new.

This article is covering a large number of topics. I never aim to “go viral” or leverage calls to action all the time. But for this one I especially could use you “liking” it or sharing it with others. Especially if you feel the same about the Fastly or PagerDuty teams I’ve spoken about. Of if you will be leveraging my survey, reaching out to Michael/Peter or know them and want to help. And of course liking and sharing this article certainly helps me tremendously.

So please – if you are reading this on LinkedIn, hit that thumbs up button and also share this article.  There are a lot of people that you’d be helping. I appreciate your time reading all of this, and would be grateful if you help more by promoting this article.