What in the job hopping hell?

You what?

I changed jobs. Again. Yes. I did. But there’s a good reason for it. It wasn’t that long ago that I posted about leaving InfluxData and joining QuestDB as their Head of Developer Relations. In fact, it was only 6 months ago. And yet, here I am, once again, posting about a job change. This is, you may notice, not characteristic of me. I was at Sun for 15 years, they Riverbed for 2.5 years, then InfluxData for 2.5 years. So what’s going on?

What’s going on?

You ever get an offer you just can’t refuse? Well, I did.

If you work in Developer Relations, then you probably know (or know of) Mary Thengvall. She quite literally wrote the book on Developer Relations. If you haven’t read it, you should. She’s also been a friend of mine for a few years (and sort of my hero in DevRel).

A couple of years ago she recommended me for a job as Director of DevRel at a small German company called Camunda. I interviewed, and was pretty excited about it, but it sort of fizzled. And then Mary came to me to let me know that, while she had been working with them to find the Director, they had decided what they really wanted was Mary herself! Duh! So she took the job and I couldn’t have been happier for her. Heck, if I had the choice between hiring me or hiring Mary, I’d have hired her too!

As soon as she told me that, I said “hire me!” Of course. again, duh. But she didn’t have any openings, was just settling in to the new role, and so on.

Fast forward a year (ish). Mary was hiring. For senior roles. Anyone who works in Devrel knows that senior roles don’t come around all that often, and senior roles working for Mary are a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

I asked, she offered, and I had to take it!

So what now?

Now I’m a Principle Developer Advocate at Camunda! But wait, that’s not IoT! That’s not Time Series Databases! WTF is going on here even?

You’re right. It’s none of those things. But what it is, for me, is an opportunity to learn more about Developer Relations (again, from the woman who literally wrote the book on it) in one place than I ever could any other way. It’s a way to expand my knowledge of the industry, and to learn a completely new skill (Business Process Automation — spoiler, if you dig back in my past far enough, you’ll find I did it 20 years ago!).

So here we are. And I couldn’t be more excited or more pleased to be starting this new adventure!