All Good Things Must Come to an End

This is my last week at WP Engine.

I joined the company almost 6 years ago, on 17 September, 2018, to work on my dream project, a WordPress development tool that I had hoped would make use of the years of experience I had building similar tools such as Primary Vagrant and others.

Unfortunately that project didn’t work out and was replaced when we bought Flywheel 8 months later. Flywheel already had Local WP so my dream project was quickly shelved.

Since then I’ve worked on our first e-commerce team, building the Live Cart feature. I’ve helped build Atlas Content Modeler and numerous small features and then I moved back into management to lead the team building Faust.js.

As each project or team has been cancelled or de-prioritized I’ve stayed on, for better or worse, as the company really did seem to care about its people. Lately though, after losing my role as an engineering manager when my team was de-prioritized, I just couldn’t do it anymore.

The thing is I really enjoyed management this round. I never thought I would say that but building a team and a product as a manager was a wonderful experience and, although we didn’t generate revenue as an open source project, was one of the most rewarding projects I’ve worked on.

I want to do that again.

Thankfully it didn’t take me long to find a new role as an engineering manager where I’ll be able to build a team and a product that really does look promising. I can’t talk about it much, yet, but I can say it is not in WordPress and will be the perfect place for me to apply my experiences as both an engineer and a manager and I can’t wait to get started.

The biggest change is that I’ll be on-site again for the first time in 11 years. At first I really didn’t think I would want to do that but moving to Chicago has changed my mind a bit. I just don’t know anyone here nor do I have any real network. I’m hoping that getting back to an office for a while will change that.

So while I’m sad to be leaving WP Engine after so long, I’m really excited about new adventures and the chance to build something awesome again.

Here’s to the future.