Thank you, CircleCI
After 3 years with CircleCI, I am saying goodbye to my wonderful colleagues and our customers.
It's been an eventful adventure, so here's a summary of events, milestones and overall gratitude.
Career Highlights
(In chronological order, and to the best of my memory)
- 1st month: Discovered a potential security exploit on our system. Ended up also live-coding the patch on an unfamiliar language (Go) in front of more than 5 folks.
- 4th month: Received the “That Motivates Me” award (similar to employee of the month for our Customer Engineering team).
- Mar 2022: Finally passed the Docker Certified Associate exam after 3 tries.
- Aug 2022: Authored public posts on how to leverage Docker Buildx, and daemonless Docker image builds with Kaniko on CircleCI.
- Jan 2023: Passed the Hashicorp Certified: Terraform Associate (002) exam
- Feb 2023: Published v0.1.0 of my Terraform Provider for CircleCI
- Aug 2023: Became CircleCI's first Staff Support Engineer.
- Dec 2023: Jumped into a incident call on my first day back from parental leave.
- Apr 2024: Codified our CircleCI On-Prem (“Server”) installation into Terraform modules for team-mates to manage on-Prem installs easily.
- Jul 2024: Codifed the self-hosted Machine Runner 3.0 installation as a Terraform module for easier reproduction of customers' runner environments.
- Aug 2024: Revamped our technical interview questions for Support roles, to better match expectations of the role re: troubleshooting.
Personal Milestones
- 2022: Got engaged to an amazing partner!
- 2023: Welcomed our first child!
Gratitudes
- The CircleCI Japan team gave me a chance in this role, despite my lack of customer-facing experience and business Japanese then.
- My then-manager, Makoto, pushed for my promotion to Staff Support Engineer. I am really honoured for the trust and belief.
- CircleCI, and my team-mates, allowed me to take a 3-month parental leave, totally undisturbed. I'm forever grateful for that.
I do apologise if I had unwittingly left out other important highlights and gratitudes.
I did have an amazing journey in the past 3 years, and learned a lot from the many smart and humble folks in CircleCI.
Thank you, CircleCI!