Sorry for the pun, but I just had to.
So I haven’t posted in a while and now that my situation has stabilized, I finally feel that I can write it all down.
April 26: I announce my resignation to Hint Innovation
I had already been looking for a new job for a while, but none of the jobs were appealing to me. I was very picky for two reasons: I had excellent conditions at Hint and I’m a good developer which gives me access to many opportunities. A week before giving my resignation, a company I had never heard of contacted me through LinkedIn (through a recruiter). The conditions were fantastics, the pay great and I would have the opportunity to build and lead my own team of developers. When I received the offer, my job satisfaction at Hint was at all time low so the decision was quite easy. Read the rest of this entry »
It has now been a week since I left Hint Innovation and I’ve been thinking about what I accomplished there. As to not forget, I decided to write it down here.
- I was their first employee
- I initiated the move from CVS to Subversion (SVN)
- I initiated the move from SVN to Mercurial (Hg) (3 years later)
- I started the internal Wiki
- I helped integrate one intern and 3 full-time employees
- I worked on many internal libraries and tools still in use at the time of my departure
- I took a major role in the development of a dozen client projects often as the only front-end developer (while still working on the back-end and storage parts)
- I took part in countless design and architectural meetings and decisions
- I presented a project to a client’s client
Final thoughts
I’m happy with what I accomplished at Hint, I feel like I had a huge impact on how the company turned out. Hopefully, I can have the same impact at my new workplace.
When I first started at Hint Innovation almost 4 years ago, the office was a tiny room of about 90 square feet. Four people could fit in the room, each with its own rather small desk with just enough room for a laptop, a monitor, a keyboard and a notepad. The room was rented by the very useful Centre d’entrepreneurship Poly-HEC-UdeM. The center rents rooms at a low price to technology startups to help them postpone the overhead of owning a full-sized office while cranking up the development of the product. It also provides coaching and classes to entrepreneurs.
The standard office equipment is also provided by them, including those unsuitable-for-office-work red chairs.
Fortunately, the chairs were eventually replaced by very comfortable ergonomic chairs (the Allsteel #19) and moved to a permanent office. The red chairs, however, have always remained in my mind as the symbol of the beginning of Hint Innovation and the company has gone a long way since then.
Last Friday, May 13th, I left Hint Innovation to go broaden my experience with a different company. As a token of gratitude to my former employers, I managed to acquire one of the old red chairs and gave it to them as a symbol of how the company started and how far it had come along since then.
