After 6 years, 8 months and 7 days, my time with VMware has come to an end. On Monday, I’ll be joining Hashicorp as a Systems Engineer.

It has been an amazing ride at VMware, and I’ve had the opportunity to work and socialise with many great people. I can’t begin to list them all, as I am 100% sure that I would leave someone out. The one person who I can’t not mention is Greg Mulholland. You’ve been an absolute rock from the day I started, and I was lucky to have someone to provide me with direction and mentorship along the way. As a nice side bonus, you turned out to be an stellar mate, and I’ll always remember our adventures together with amusement. Gotta love those fluffy slippers!

“I thought you were a VMware lifer!”

I received this comment as my news spread around, and I have been with VMware for long enough now that I can see why people would think that. So why the change?

Time with the family

Far and away, the trigger for this was my wanting to be able to spend more time with my family, and especially not put my kids through the emotional anxiety of me travelling. I hear you ask “You had an APJ (Asia-Pacific and Japan) role, didn’t you expect to travel?”. Yes, I absolutely did. What I didn’t anticipate was the impact this would have on my kids, especially my 8 year old daughter. I tried a few mechanisms to downlpay the impact, but it was no good. I had to put my family first, and VMware was super respectful about that being the case, even if my choice was to leave in order to fulfil this.

Rediscovering my passion

The second thing I realised was that somewhere along the line I had lost my passion. It used to be a regular occurrence for me to stay up late, tinkering and learning about technology. That trend dimished over time as the efforts I had to put out in my day job began to take their toll, and left me wanting to do anything but technology in my spare time. I’ve been watching Hashicorp for a number of years, and I have already started to play again, which is a great indicator for me.

Building something amazing

As part for VMware’s Cloud Management Business Unit, I was part of a very mature and stable business. In joining Hashi, I’ll be part of a fairly nascent business (in contrast to their OSS position) and again, I’m really excited to throw myself into this and have a real impact on growing that into something amazing.

Wrapping Up

I pick up the fire hose in roughly 48 hours. I don’t know how long it will take me to start finding some useful nuggets to share, but I am really hoping that I can share my learning adventures with you all, and rekindle my passion for writing. Onwards and upwards!