After three and a half years at Basho, I’ve decided to move on.

Leaving a job that you love and have been very successful with over many years is always a very difficult thing to do. However, there comes a point where in order to continue to grow you must make a drastic change and reinvent yourself.

Starting as a Ruby and JavaScript engineer when first hired at Basho, I had to the opportunity to grow as a conference speaker, travel the world, have original research published, work on an international research project, and become an accomplished distributed systems engineer.

I’m truly grateful for my time at Basho.

Lessons

The biggest thing I’d like to emphasize after all of my time at Basho is that you can do whatever you want to.

When I started at Basho I was hired as a JavaScript engineer. I didn’t know what a distributed system was, I didn’t know what concurrency was, didn’t know what parallelism was, didn’t know what mutexes were. I learned it all on the job because I wanted to.

I was never asked to be in SyncFree. I found out there was a meetup in Belgium in January and I bought my own plane ticket and took vacation time.

I dropped out of undergrad around 4 times. I dropped out of graduate school around 3 times. Brown University told me I would never be a graduate student given my “lack of undergraduate research.”

I hustled as hard as I can, I independently published papers, I worked my ass off to do what I believed in.

You can do this. I’m not special; I just worked hard and so can you!

I leave you with a quote from Tyler Durden in Fight Club that inspires me: “You decide your own level of involvement.”