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My first day at HashiCorp!

Today was my first day at HashiCorp. After a day mostly consisting of setting up my computer, a very fancy monitor, setting up so many online accounts (boy does a modern company have so many accounts!), I remembered that I wanted to announce things on here 🙂

Where?

HashiCorp! They’re responsible for a boatload of tools relevant if you work in cloud infrastructure, or development generally: Vagrant, Vault, Packer, Nomad, Consul, and Terraform, the project that I’m working on.

What?

Terraform! Terraform lets you plan infrastructure as code, and works across cloud providers. I’m joining the Terraform Core team, meaning I’ll be contributing to the bit at the center (while other teams work on say, helping Terraform work with cloud providers).

Why?

Joining this team serves a confluence of interests I have:

  • Working in cloud infrastructure
  • Contributing to open source, for projects meaningful to developers
  • Moving to Golang (I’ve wanted to develop skills in a more systems-focused language for a while!)

Combine that with lots of other good things — including HashiCorp being a remote-first engineering organization, lots of fantastic people there (necessary shoutout to Turing-Incomplete cohost Justin Campbell here).

When considering this role versus other opportunities, I honestly couldn’t think of a way for another role to fit:

I get to build tools for developers: but without the pressure of the production on-call.

I’m joining a company that’s been around long enough to have some process and systems in place, but nimble enough to change as necessary.

I’m back on an engineering team: I’m not sure if/when I’ll try engineering leadership again (there’s time! careers are long!), but this feels like a really good spot for me right now.

On the process

As to what led to this, I’ve been thinking to write about the hunt process (which, from first interview to signed offer, was 6-8 weeks depending on how you count it), or how I got to this position, but realized I didn’t need to put that pressure on myself for a day one post 🙂

One thing I will say is that hunting/interviewing/decisioning while burnt out was horrible. I’ve thought about how to write about it to effectively communicate the very very VERY dark places my brain went. I could sometimes feel it in my head, like a CLICK when I was able to pull out of it. Sometimes I wasn’t able to stop it. If I write nothing else about the process in the end, I do want to say that.

I love the transparency my friend Sarah shared about her journey (from 2018), and I found that article so valuable and interesting. I don’t know that I’m brave enough to share the names like Sarah did, but maybe it would still be helpful. I’ll have to think about it!

Happy first day to me 🙂

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