After a second 2 year tour as a Sales Engineer at Fastly, I am sad to announce that today is my last day.  When Fastly invited me back, I was injured and looking for a safe place to confirm my recovery.  Looking back, the amount of gratitude I feel to Fastly is hard to express.  I have a wonderful extended family there and I’ll never forget them.  It is always hard leaving a company where you have total faith in the technology.  Especially with such great teammates.  Factor in the recent addition of Signal Sciences and Fastly’s ever-evolving Compute@Edge platform, Fastly will only continue to help firms build amazing things.  Highly performant, dependable and safe things.

Looking back at the four and a half years I have improved my demo, coding and sales skills.   My knowledge in a diverse number of topics topics has grown too.  And experiencing joining when they had fewer than 200 employees and getting to experience the path to nearly 1000 has been interesting and educational too.

A bittersweet goodbye and it ended on a high note.  Yesterday was our 3rd Virtual event where I got to teach basic electronics and programming on a Raspberry Pi.  Including the team supporting the event we had nearly 65 people on the zoom call.  Attendees brought their kids to learn and participate.  This was the second event I’ve seen that.  So the week ends with with a real high combined with the sadness of parting ways with coworkers and friends alike.  Too many Fastly and Haute folks to list that were part of that last event to list.  But I’m sure you know who you are!

I am also going to miss collaborating with Darrell DeCosta on this event.  It was his original idea, and he created a very slick Simon game.  Called Pimon, it leverages the components we leveraged in the experience.  (Heck, I’m really going to miss working with him all together.  Passionate about tech, with the a high level of curiosity, intelligence and integrity – and a natural leader to boot.)

As for next steps, I’m going to enjoy my weekend.  I’ll post about the next chapter once I am settled in at a new opportunity.