Four years ago today I started work at Lookout, Inc., embarking on the longest journey of my career to date. I had left Apture frustrated with our inability to grow the product and engineering team, but with pockets full of experience at building and deploying service-oriented applications “my way.” At the time Apture was literally down the block from Lookout, so on a Friday I left Apture and the following Monday I took my same commute in to Lookout. What I wasn’t able to get at Apture, I found at Lookout.

As one of the first fourty or so employees, I’ve been fortunate enough not only to see an organization grow up, but also to play an important role in that growth.

To give you an idea of what four years looks like, here are the initiatives I’m most proud to have worked on:

  • Deploying Jenkins/Git/Gerrit, cementing continuous integration and code review into the development process.
  • Building a large Selenium test suite to help qualify releases of the consumer web application
  • Moving the consumer backend web application from two week to daily deployments, driving a 33% deployment failure rate down to 3%.
  • Leading the team which built and delivered an entirely new version of the consumer web application
  • Leading the team which built and delivered the Small and Medium Business product, one of the first service oriented products delivered at Lookout, based on 5 discrete services.
  • Leading the team (same as the last team) which built and delivered the beta product for what has been since renamed to Mobile Threat Protection, composed of a number of discrete services, built on newly deployed infrastructure components such as Apache Kafka and Apache Storm.
  • Helping hire over 30 new members of Lookout Engineering.
  • hackers.lookout.com and Lookout on GitHub, pushing open source engagement as a top-level engineering goal.

With the founding of my current team, Core Systems, we’ve finally reached a size to merit this specialization in infrastructure engineering which is of particular interest to me.

I’ve now been at Lookout for longer than any previous employer. It has definitely been a roller coaster, but it is still one I don’t intend on leaving any time soon.