This is now the third or fourth iteration of having a blog. So much of my writing has taken place elsewhere, like the PyCon and Python Software Foundation blogs, where I wrote around 175 posts in total. A lot of it was small announcement stuff, like there being 25 tickets left to yet another sold out PyCon, but I got to write plenty of longer content that I really enjoyed.

Here are some of my favorite bits of writing from that time:

• I authored the PSF’s first Code of Conduct. I had some editing help from a few key folks in the community, and after one of the longest and fastest moving email threads I’ve ever seen, the membership approved it in 2013. It’s since been expanded and improved, and there’s a whole working group around it. The announcement post goes into a bit of my reasoning for why I went ahead and wrote it.
• Bringing First Timers to PyCon Through Financial Aid told the story of two people whose trips to PyCon were made possibly by the Financial Aid program, which in 2013 got a generous doubling up to $100,000.
• How the kids stole the show: Young Coders tutorial at PyCon about two days of tutorials for children to learn Python with Raspberry Pis. I’m proud of a lot of things we did with PyCon in the time I worked on it, and this was among the best of them.
• I also interviewed a bunch of great people over the years about their upcoming involvement in PyCon, usually for keynotes or tutorials. Three of my favorite interviews were with Armin Ronacher in 2011 and Dave Beazely in 2011 and 2013.

I also wrote a lot in my last job at Elastic outside of assigned work, things like research into strategy that were basically long form internal blog posts. A couple of those ideas will end up on here in abstract as I work through my writing backlog, since I think they’re broadly interesting.

I like writing, but I haven’t made much time for it outside of those sorts of jobs. Maybe this time it sticks :)

This was originally posted at https://lnkd.in/p/gVsriqGZ

Unfortunately it happened. After seven years, I was a part of yesterday’s layoffs at Elastic.

I’ve had it happen before and it’s never good or the right time or any of that. In some ways I’m glad it happened in the middle of leading a meeting with my team, because I got to say goodbye. What started as weekly sync turned into losing access to what I was sharing, then discovering live that it was the end for me. Luckily, losing Zoom access doesn’t interrupt ongoing meetings, so my team invited others to the room and turned it into an almost two hour chat. It was better to cry with them.

The team really made my time there, which made ending the meeting so hard. I think I made positive impacts on the team and the systems as we built it all up over the years, but what made letting go so hard was all of the positive impacts they made on me. I’ve always carried myself as a leader—whether or not I had the title—and each person on that team helped me become the designer, developer, and leader that the team needed. We did it together.

I’m going to start writing and looking and trying to figure out what’s next. I was a principal engineer (staff at most places) and had the role of tech lead for the last two years. I built Elastic’s support for the GCP Marketplace as my first task when I started, then designed and built all sorts of related systems that transformed how the company handled billing, and built up the teams and people that made it all happen. I’ll share more in the next while about what I know and what makes me a good part of a team.

If you know anyone looking for someone like me, I appreciate any help or pointers you can give.

Have a complex JSON response to parse? Use glom for that.

This post covers how we parsed API responses when building out an internal client for Elasticsearch.