Dear Datastax,
I couldn’t leave without writing you a note to thank you and reminisce a bit about the good times we shared together. The last two years have been intense, memorable, and exciting. Working with you has been a wonderful experience.
It seems so long ago when I showed up in Austin for my first week on the job with a handful of people on the new cloud team. You were so supportive and everyone was so nice and welcoming. I don’t think that office exists any longer and I can no longer count the cloud team members on my fingers. We both have changed a lot since then–I know I’m certainly better because of my time with you. Of course there are the cool technologies that we played with that can now season my resume, but there is also what we built together, how we built it together, and most importantly, there are the people with whom we did all the awesome things.
We spent an awful lot of time together, but I appreciate that you supported me spending time with my family. Most days I’d check in with you around 7:30am and didn’t wish you goodnight until 10:45pm. Even though we worked a lot, I was able to walk my daughter to school every school day. I was able to attend all the parent/teacher conferences for my kids. I never had to miss a band concert, play, camp out, choir concert, piano recital, or graduation. I was able to take care of sick family members. Every evening I could sit down to dinner with my family. Thank you for never judging me poorly for trying to be a good husband and father.
I have so many happy memories with you. Learning new things. Passionate discussions trying to get to the best solution. Kosher BBQ in Chicago. Live demos where the demo-gods smiled and things did not crash and burn. Dinner under the space shuttle. The satisfaction we shared seeing our code start to come together and work. However, some of my fondest memories are when things didn’t work and we would swarm with the team in a web meeting to complain, laugh, and work on a solution with people dropping to eat dinner or put kids to bed and then popping back in to bang against the problem until we figured it out at 1, 2, 3am.
Do you remember last May during the last few days before Accelerate? What a flurry of activity! Then the training session started. We crossed our fingers, held our breaths, watched, and waited to see if what we built would be able to handle everything thrown at it. Everything worked–we did a great job there.
How about the week leading up to the release of Astra? That was some crazy fun chaos as we scrambled to get last minute tweaks, fixes, and changes (such as renaming Apollo to Astra) deployed and tested. I was exhausted as we finally made the switchover changes to put Astra out there so that anyone could plug in a credit card and get a running Cassandra database a minute later. We did some more testing to make sure everything was working correctly and then I went to bed reveling in our accomplishment. I slept like the dead.
Now that it is time for me to try something else I’m certainly going to miss you, but I’m also so proud of what we were able to do together. With friends and colleagues we built Astra. We created a product that I (as a developer) want to use. I am using it. I will continue to use it. I hope Astra will continue to grow and become a huge success. I hope you will remember me as fondly as I remember you.
Cheers,
Nathan
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanbak/
http://www.nathanbak.com/
