After over 12 years, today was my last day at IBM.

Joining IBM

I graduated in 2008 and ended up looking for a job just as the 2008 financial crisis was raging. I don’t remember all the companies I applied to, but in the lot there was Sun Microsystems. A few weeks after I sent my application, they laid off 6000 employees, needless to say I never got a reply!

I also applied to IBM and after many interviews was given an offer in December 2008 … to start in July 2009!

I was initially put back by the 6 month delay and I was unsure what to do. It did not take much convincing from friends and family that this was actually a great opportunity to “live the life” and discover the world before starting my working life.

With the bit of money I had left from the university grant and work placement, I booked a round-the-world plane ticket and travelled for a couple of months.

Roles in IBM

While 12 years at the same company may appear long, I’ve worked on very different products and moved a lot between teams in the first half of my career (not necessarily by choice!).

2009 - 2011: JVM Level 3 Service

My first role was working as a service engineer for the IBM JVM. With hindsight, this role had a significant impact on the rest of my career. First I got to learn the internals of a JVM and gained a relatively deep understanding about Garbage Collectors and JIT compilation. This role also put me in direct contact with IBM customers and usually in this role when you chat with customers, their systems are down or have suffered an outage! So it taught me how to deal with customers, be assertive and lead investigations.

2011 - 2011: Mobile Optimization Platform

I then moved onto my first role as a developer. The project was a prototype for an edge platform/CDN for mobile services. This project did not last long and I don’t quite remember the reasons why it was cancelled. In the end I got to write quite a lot of code and it was a good learning experience for me. Also most of that team would later become Event Streams but I left to join another promising project.

2011 - 2014: PureApplication Systems

PureApplication Systems was a big bet by IBM to provide an on-prem cloud platform. When I joined the project we were only a dozen, when I left we were hundreds across all continents! Being an early member gave me tons of opportunities and I ended up leading a significant part of the project even though I was still very junior. I got to spend many months on assignments in the USA and visited a few customers across Europe too. This was my first role that involved leadership and it was fun to see the project go from rough ideas to seeing these massive PureApplication racks in customer data centers.

At this point I had some health issues and ended up off work for a few months and then only worked part time for the next year.

2014 - 2015: MQLight

I don’t have a lot of memories from this role as I was mostly out and not very focus on the work. I ended up building a client for MQLight in Python. While off sick, to keep me active I had started learning Python so it was a good accident to end up using this language at work too.

2015 - 2015: MQ on PureApplication

As I started returning to work, I was given the opportunity to complete a small project. Due to my expertise with PureApplication and now Python, I was asked to build the MQ on PureApplication product. The goal was to build the product from scratch, release it and hand it over to the MQ team. The tiny team (we were 3) and the defined timeline and completion criteria made it the perfect role to regain confidence and effectively return to work.

2015 - 2021: Event Streams

After completing the previous assignment, I needed to join a new team and I was moved to Event Streams. At the time, the person leading the Kafka work was leaving so I inherited that responsibility not knowing what Kafka was! In the next few months, I got completely sucked in the Kafka project and community. I started contributing to Apache, writing articles, attending conferences and meetups and overall interacting with the community as much as I could. And here we are, 6 years later, I am now a committer and member of the PMC for Apache Kafka!

What’s next

First I’d like to thank all the people I worked with over these past 12 years, most of them were very bright, driven, friendly and helped me tremendously. I learned a lot working alongside you and I’m very grateful for these moments. Thank you!

I’m now taking a few weeks off to recharge. I also just moved back to France, so I still have plenty of things to do.

I’m starting my next role in October, I’ll tell a bit more about it very soon.