My journey at Slide comes to an end today, when I leave this evening I will once again return to being a free agent (if only for two days). Some of my coworkers have casually referred to my writings over the past few days of my “memoirs”, which isn’t too far off to be honest. When I leave Slide this evening, my employment will have accounted for roughly 10% of my entire life and 50% of my adult life. Writing my side of the story down, to some extent, has been more about telling a story to myself and less about telling it to anybody else (apologies). So much of my time spent at Slide has been in a state of controlled choas that at times it’s hard for me to remember when things were done, who was doing them and the order in which they happened.
The two questions I’ve invariably gotten since I gave my notice and subsequently started writing this series of posts have been: why are you leaving and where are you going? My reasons for leaving are irrelevant, I will say that if I could take the people I’ve been working with at Slide with me, I would. I’ve learned such an incredible amount from those that I’ve worked with, both technical and non-technical, while at Slide. Whenever I would pitch friends on the idea of joining Slide, my take-home point was always “when you join Slide, you will not be the smartest person there.” I feel lucky that I was given the opportunity to “come of age” as a young engineer in a company of so many tremendously talented individials, given the chance for a do-over, I would still play my cards the way I’ve played them. I joined Slide a punk kid from Texas, I’m leaving Slide a slightly-more-learned punk kid from Texas.
As to where I am going, after an extended vacation of Saturday and Sunday, I will be joining my second startup ever (Slide’s a pretty good first time out) on Monday. When I started looking at other companies I had a couple of criteria, I wanted to join a smaller team (Slide’s upwards of a hundred people or so) and I had to really like who I would be working with. Tristan, Jesse, Can (John) and the team from Apture fit both criteria. I’m not going to go into detail about what I’m really going to be doing there or where Apture is going as a company. I will say that after two and a half years of working and studying at Slide, I’m looking forward to employing what I’ve learned and continuing my education at Apture.
See you on the beaches of the world.