On the 15th of March, 2017, I marked 7 years with Powershop ! 🎉
[1] This is me working for Powershop at YouDo + 4 years employed at Powershop proper.
From the beginning, it was a roller coaster ride fixing incidents, adding features and scheming fun things with the crew at Powershop including Paddy the friendly labrador (miss him!). It was a small team of developers working as consultants. Rails was young, plugins were in, I gave up losing wifi on every Ubuntu upgrade for a Mac.
Fast forward three years, we found ourselves in Newtown, or maybe it’s Mt Cook. I started leading teams, and projects. I really enjoyed the growing and caring of others on the team. We had fun team names such as “<3”. We delivered such goodness including a new price comparison site, Powershop Australia, a new pricing engine, and Powershop UK !
This point in time also marks my first year as a Development Manager. I will like to devote more time to this in future posts. In the meantime, have a read at this excellent post from my colleague, Emma Bassett about her reflections from a year ago.
Not everything was a success the first time around, but the people here really value learning from our mistakes. The managers at Powershop also put a great deal of deliberate thought into the culture, which I can see it paying off in spades.
Personally, this really, really showed when I was practising for my RubyConf AU talk. Believe me, I was horrible the first few rounds. Everyone was really encouraging though, and Roger took the time and effort to observe how I spoke and helped me out on specific points of speech delivery.
From the teams I was in, I have the great pleasure of working with some exceptional people. It has been really awesome to be around to watch all of you (you know who are!) grow in such a short space of time. I also currently have the great pleasure of working with a fantastic and collaborative set of peers, who I know, I can’t find anywhere else. 7 years ago, I went in hoping to learn from some smart people. 7 years later, I’m still here not just because of the learning but the people around here are the perfect combination of smart, respectful and caring. Long may it continue.