Why I Decided to Join the Themes Team

#career #gatsby #webdev #productivity

Originally posted on laurieontech.dev

As promised, a "more than a twitter thread" post on my new job!

Here are the headlines:

I'm still working at Gatsby!
I'm still a Staff Software Engineer (even if I neglected to mention that publicly prior to this)
I'm now a member of the Themes Team!
My former team, the Learning Team, is undergoing some changes of its own

My time on the Learning Team

I loved working on this team ❤️. And without the prompting of organizational changes, I likely would have stayed there for a while longer.

Some of the wonderful work I got to do:

Open source maintenance for Gatsby docs
Driving forward a vision and implementation of the Gatsby Cloud docs experience
Community teaching through webinars, talks, etc
Development of documentation for undocumented features
Mentorship and collaboration within and outside of the team

It was a great role, focused on the content-based work I'd found myself gravitating towards in the previous year.

But over time I started to realize there were drawbacks.

Being a constant editor made it harder to write.

I was a bit of an internal consultant. Something I have considerable experience with and had actively chosen to move away from for a while.

Developing docs and instructional materials meant building small projects from scratch time and time again. I missed some of the larger architectural deep dives and team-based code collaboration.

So what happened?

Well, startups are always evolving. For Gatsby, that meant looking at how we did content and aligning a few different teams and focus areas into a larger group. This is an exciting direction for a number of reasons and I look forward to seeing what this talented group of people will accomplish.

However, as these conversations developed, I realized that the role I was going to take on in that team was always going to focus more on "filling holes" than anything else. I want to be clear that this was no one's fault but my own. But in my heart, I'm a completionist. It was too easy for me to focus on the firehose of community contributions and constantly push code exploration down the road.

So I started thinking.

Themes Team

I realized that I was always going to gravitate towards content in some ways, but I'd likely be more effective in that work if it wasn't my full-time job.

I'm also very proud of the engineering work I've done over the past decade. That was essential knowledge and experience on the Learning Team; it's not easy figuring out how undocumented stuff works! However, there were "typical" software development tasks that I missed.

I missed collaboration on larger projects. I missed some of the bigger architecture discussions. I missed bug fixes!

While on Learning I'd made themes a bit of a pet project. I was fascinated by what the team was working to develop. Really innovative thinking and development around next-generation tooling.

It's worth noting that the Themes Team needs a new name! It's a team working on Gatsby themes, but they're also working on Blocks, Theme-UI, and some upcoming libraries. Recommendations for names are always welcome 😅.

Having interacted with this team quite a bit on documentation, and even some community input on points of friction, I felt it was a great fit to combine what I loved and what I was missing.

So I asked our VP of Engineering if I could be a part of it - and I cannot thank Gatsby leadership enough for their support. Every single person I talked to was wholeheartedly in favor of this new direction for me. After working out the logistics of the transition (which will be ongoing for the next couple weeks) I had a green light!

What's next?

And now I have a lot of codebases to learn! In all seriousness, I'm ramping up and it's going to take some time.

But I can't imagine a better place to blend my skillsets and interests. The opportunity to take my user and product-centric development style and have a direct impact on tooling. The ability to learn from a truly amazing group of people - often referred to as the "magicians" or "mad scientists". And the thrill of diving deep into JavaScript and the surrounding ecosystem.

This is the exact right place to be as I move into the next decade of my career. And I'm hopeful the work I undertake will result in even more cool content for all of you!

Top comments (4)

James Q Quick • Apr 15 '20

So excited for you! Also really a powerful message that Gatsby as a company can quickly adapt and help put you in the position where you will be most happy!