#newjob

Posted on by Andy Piper

In late 2011, I was contacted by a very charming, smart and persuasive French gentleman who spoke of clouds, platform-as-a-service, and polyglot programming. It took him and his team a couple of months to get me thinking seriously about a career change, after 10 great years at IBM. I’d spent that period with “Big Blue” coding in Java and C, and primarily focused on enterprise application servers, message queueing, and integration – and yet the lure of how easy vmc push[1] made it for me to deploy and scale an app was astounding! Should I make the transition to a crazy new world? Over Christmas that year, I decided it would be a good thing to get in on this hot new technology and join VMware as Developer Advocate on the Cloud Foundry team. I joined the team early in 2012.

The Cloud Foundry adventure has been amazing. The day after I joined the team, the project celebrated its first anniversary, and we announced the BOSH continuous deployment tool; I spent much of that first year with the team on a whirlwind of events and speaking engagements, growing the community. The Developer Relations team that Patrick Chanezon and Adam Fitzgerald put together was super talented, and it was brilliant to be part of that group. Peter, Chris, Josh, Monica, Raja, Rajdeep, Alvaro, Eric, Frank, Tamao, Danny, Chloe, D, Giorgio, friends in that extended team… it was an honour.

A year after I joined, VMware spun out Cloud Foundry, SpringSource and other technologies into a new company, Pivotal – headed up by Paul Maritz. I’ve been privileged to work under him, Rob Mee at Pivotal Labs, and most closely, my good friend James Watters on the Cloud Foundry team. I’ve seen the opening of our new London offices on Old Street, welcomed our partners and customers into that unique collaborative and pairing environment, and observed an explosion of activity and innovation in this space. We launched an amazing product. James Bayer heads up a remarkable group of technologists working full-time on Cloud Foundry, and it has been a pleasure to get to know him and his team. Most recently, I’ve loved every minute working with Cornelia, Ferdy, Matt, Sabha and Scott (aka the Platform Engineering team), another talented group of individuals from whom I’ve learned much.

Over the course of the last two years I’ve seen the Platform-as-a-Service space grow, establish itself, and develop – most recently resulting in my recent talk at bcs Oxfordshire:

Last week, we announced the forthcoming Cloud Foundry Foundation – and one could argue that as a community and Open Source kinda guy, this was the direction I’ve helped to move things in the past two years, although I can claim no credit at all for the Foundation announcement itself. I’ve certainly enjoyed hosting occasional London Cloud Foundry Community meetups and drinks events (note, next London PaaS User Group event has 2 CF talks!), and I’ve made some great friends locally and internationally through the ongoing growth of the project. I’m proud of the Platform event we put on last year, I think the upcoming Cloud Foundry Summit will be just as exciting, and I’m happy to have been a part of establishing and growing the CF community here in Europe.

Cloud Foundry is THE de facto Open Source PaaS standard, the ecosystem is strong and innovative, and that has been achieved in a transparent and collaborative way, respectful to the community, in a good-natured way in the face of competition. Rest assured that I’ll continue to watch the project and use PaaSes which implement it (I upgraded to a paid Pivotal Web Services account just this past week, I tried BlueMix, and I’m an ongoing fan of the Anynines team).

There are many missing shout-outs here… you folks know who you are, and should also know that I’ve deeply enjoyed learning from you and working with you. Thank you, Pivotal team! I do not intend to be a stranger to the Bay Area! In my opinion, Pivotal is positioned brilliantly in offering an end-to-end mobile, agile development, cloud platform and big data story for the enterprise. I look forward to continuing the conversations around that in the next couple of weeks.

[…]

What happens after “the next couple of weeks”? Well, this is as good time as any (!) to close that chapter, difficult though it is to leave behind a team I’ve loved working with, on a product and project that is undoubtedly going to continue to be fantastically successful this year and beyond. So, it is time to announce my next steps, which may or may not be clear from the title of this post… 🙂

Joining Twitter!

I joined Twitter as a user on Feb 21 2007. On the same day, seven years later, I accepted a job offer to go and work with the Twitter team as a Developer Advocate, based in London.

If you’ve been a long-term follower of mine either here on this blog, or on Twitter, or elsewhere, you’ll know that Twitter is one of my favourite tools online. It has been transformational in my life and career, and it changed many of my interactions. True story: between leaving IBM and joining VMware I presented at Digital Bristol about social technologies, and I was asked, which one I would miss the most if it went away tomorrow; the answer was simple: Twitter. As an Open Source guy, too, I’ve always been impressed with Twitter’s contributions to the broader community.

I couldn’t be more #excited to get started with the Twitter Developer Relations team in April!

Follow me on Twitter – @andypiper – to learn more about my next adventure…

[1] vmc is dead, long live cf!

Published by Andy Piper

IoT | Open Source | Community | LEGO; Views: my own

31 thoughts on “#newjob”

  5. Best of luck Andy, look forward to reading all your posts about the new venture

  7. Hi Andy! Woohoo! That’s quite a story, my friend, and I am soooo excited and incredibly delighted for you! I am sure you must be ecstatic and everything and very inspired about the new adventure about to unfold! Congratulations, Andy, and wish you & Twitter all the very best! And please do keep making a dent in this world, as you always have!

    See you on the Twittersphere! 😀 hehe

  8. Congratulations, there are a lot of terrific people at Twitter doing great work. You’ll love it. I’m sure you leaving Pivotal will be just as painful for them as your leaving IBM was to me. You’ve done more to drive open IoT and MQTT than just about anyone.

    Best always,
    – Joe

  9. All the best to you Andy. You’ve made some great contributions to VMware and Pivotal, and we’re sorry to see you go. At the same time, Twitter is a great company and I look forward to seeing your impact there.

  13. Wow, I did not see that one coming, I guess I can thank Patrick for his careful tweets selection. Congrats pal, now I’m sure I’ll be paying more attention to that little birdie. But, does that mean you’ll be twitting *even more*?

    1. Hmm good question 🙂 possibly more about Twitter products and APIs, I’m not sure it is possible to tweet more than I do already… thanks for the gratz!

    1. Hey Michael, thanks very much! yup, I’m friends with Paul and enjoyed his talk(s) at QCon. Good luck with the new role, Stratos is pretty cool stuff!

  15. Andy, I was just catching up on your blog post about Pivotal — I’m way behind — and then discovered that you buried the lede on the move over to Twitter. Good luck on your new job.

    P.S. When/if my dissertation emerges, there’s a paragraph about you starting to blog in 2001, as a precursor to even John Patrick finding out in 2003 that no CIOs knew what blogging was.

    1. You’re right, I did kinda bury the lead here 🙂 thanks for the good wishes, I hope you’re doing well!

      Looking forward to checking out your dissertation!

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