A while ago somebody recommended me the book Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson. I can’t remember who it was; what I do know is that reading the book made an impact. It kind of reinforced something that I always believed in: change is good.
I won’t say reading that little book let to my decision to change things drastically (work-wise speaking), but it did help.
“Change things?” you may ask? Well, yes, because after having worked for SpringSource since the beginning of 2005 (so that’s 4 years actually), I’ve decided to quit. It’s been quite ride and a lot of great fun, but it’s time for something new. Since many people have met me during those 4 years as a guy always promoting, training and consulting on Spring technologies, I thought I should put out a bit of an explanation. Before I move on; I’m still involved with SpringSource and Spring and will be for (hopefully) a long time to come–not on a day-to-day basis anymore however.
To give you a bit of background: I joined the Spring development team somewhere in 2003 after having worked with the technology shortly as a (quite excited) user. SpringSource was founded end of 2004 in London. Joost, Steven, Leonard and me quickly followed suit by setting up the Dutch branch early 2005. Since then, things have gone quite rapidly: we secured a round of funding in 2007, moved our headquarters to San Mateo, California, acquired Covalent a few months later, secured another round of funding in 2008 and had the G2One (Groovy & Grails) guys join the fun later that year. We’re well over a 100 people now at SpringSource and it’s going quite well.
I think Spring is one of the examples of how to build a good product. Over the years, I’ve grown to believe that the only way of building a good product is by involving users and listening to what problems they really face and what feedback they are giving you. In the Spring development team and later on at SpringSource we’ve always done that and are still doing that. Combine the input you get from the users with a bunch of very (I say very) talented people such as Juergen, Rod, Arjen, Rob, Adrian, Thomas, Costin and Mark (and MarkF and MarkT…) to have them work on building Spring… and the rest is history they say. By the way, I know, by naming only a few people, I’m omitting all the others, but then again, you know who you are!! Again, these people I listed above may have done the bulk of the actual programming, don’t forget the value of the community. People like Matt Raible, Chris Richardson, Roland Nelson, Craig Walls, the New York Java Consultant (can’t remember your name dude) and many many others have proved invaluable. Yes, again I’m making that same mistake again, but these were just the ones that came to mind. In other words, in the past few years, I’ve grown to understand the real power of community-driven (software) development and to my mind, SpringSource is one of the leaders in this space.
Back to myself: in all these years, I’ve been traveling like crazy, have probably trained more than 500 people using Spring, have consulting with many Fortune1000 clients of ours and have spoken at many conferences. Late 2008 I had five conference-type engagements in a row. Copenhagen was followed by Malmø and Miami. The last trip was to Tel Aviv to join in the JavaEdge conference, organized by the great bunch of people that call themselves AlphaCSP. What struck me when in Miami was that I had kind of been absorbed by all this travel, the speaking engagements and all that and had forgotten about some of the other stuff that makes me tick. The travel is great, the speaking even better and what was unforgettable was when people went back home being inspired about a piece of technology that’d help them be more productive. But…
What got lost (for me personally) though over the past few years is working with a team to achieve great results. This is what has always greatly motivated me. At SpringSource, although we’re working quite closely together (and yes, the company is one big team–I’ve been amazed by how well a distributed company can work), I have been focused more and more on the consulting-type engagements. Although there are a lot of nice people I met doing the things I did the last few years, I do really miss the fact of having an office filled with a a nice bunch of co-workers (SpringSource co-workers: please read on).
One other thing I missed was the entrepreneurial side of things. Together with long-time friend Joost, I started JTeam in 2002 and a few years later started the Dutch branch of (back then) Interface21. Setting up a business, being creative about everything you do, finding new ways of getting clients, delivering results, hiring good people, motivating the team; these are all things I did, but slowly faded away in the last few years. That’s something I don’t blame anybody for, it’s just the way it is.
So, there I was, feeling ultimately lucky that I have been able to be part of this ultimately talented group of people that brought Spring (well, and all the other stuff, such as Aspect, Apache Tomcat, and more) to the world and are on their way to bring out lots more good stuff (have you seen Spring Integration, it really rocks), but at the same time missing something. After giving this a lot of thought, I finally came to the conclusion that it’s time to move on.
In a later post I’ll highlight what’s next in store for me. In the meantime, my quitting SpringSource (or at least, employment contract) does not mean I’m out of the picture. I’ll remain involved (tho’ on a less time-intensive basis) and will still be advocating Spring technologies here and there (yes guys, if you don’t mind, I’m still coming to Sardegna and Genova and Cracow).
For those of you that would like to get in touch with me (I can imagine you may have questions about the above), you can do so via this blog or via my personal email address (firstname at lastname dot net). Anything SpringSource-related, I’ll forward you to the appropriate person. Alternatively, you can also directly contact Peter Meijer (at firstname dot lastname at springsource dot com).
A last word to all you SpringSource guys (alhtough I’m not gone): I’ll miss you!!
