{"id":680,"date":"2021-11-22T12:13:13","date_gmt":"2021-11-22T20:13:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nathanbak.com\/?p=680"},"modified":"2026-01-02T19:59:39","modified_gmt":"2026-01-03T03:59:39","slug":"dear-circle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/?p=680","title":{"rendered":"Dear Circle"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Dear Circle,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In thinking back over the past year and a half, I realize that we shared many happy adventures together.  I wanted to send you this note to thank you for the great experience and let you know how much I&#8217;m going to miss you.  This has been the first job I ever had that I was able to explain to my Mother what I did and what you do. Everyone understands the problem we&#8217;ve been working together to solve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You may recall that I joined shortly after COVID became a thing and we were still in lock-down for a &#8220;just a couple weeks&#8221; to &#8220;flatten the curve&#8221;.  Everyone was friendly as I came on board and was trying to figure out how things worked.  A couple weeks later I went to the office for the first time to get a laptop upgrade and I inadvertently set off the alarm&#8211;sorry about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think Focus Time was a big step in helping families like mine.  My family was probably the first to use Focus Time in a real setting.  I remember in the early (prerelease) days when my kids would frantically barge into my office because some random site was blocked and they needed to access it &#8220;now&#8221; in their class.  My family had a lot of discussions about Focus Time and screen time in general&#8211;some of those discussions helped Focus Time improve and other discussions helped my family improve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Do you remember the Release Bonanza on 21 October 2020?  We took a risk with that, but we worked hard, planned carefully, and we had a smooth execution.  Perhaps it&#8217;s not remembered since it ended up almost a non-event, but I&#8217;ve always felt that was an important turning point in our doing better cloud releases.  I still have the T-Shirt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And what about the online party on 12 February 2021 where we counted down to 6:00 pm and cheered?  I know people had different reasons for celebrating.  I was happy that the 10 pm-4 am release windows (who thought that was a good idea?) were finally a thing of the past.  That was another important turning point and we were finally able to dedicate more time and energy on important things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I appreciate how you let me use Innovation Time to experiment and try new things.  You were patient with my zany POCs that didn&#8217;t go very far (perhaps someone else with finish some of them).  We also worked together to make ideas like usage emails and recommendations into features that benefit our users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I now have an opportunity to try something new and I hope doing that is the right choice for me and my family.  I wish you continued growth and success and will be watching your progress as I continue to be a user.  I&#8217;m going to miss you and all the neat things we&#8217;ve done together, but I hope we both continue to do neat things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cheers,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Nathan<br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/nathanbak\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/nathanbak\/<\/a><br><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nathanbak.com\/\">http:\/\/www.nathanbak.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dear Circle, In thinking back over the past year and a half, I realize that we shared many happy adventures together. I wanted to send you this note to thank you for the great experience and let you know how much I&#8217;m going to miss you. This has been the first job I ever had &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/?p=680\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Dear Circle&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=680"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":687,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680\/revisions\/687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}