Thank you, Twilio

I recently left Twilio, my first full-time employer.

I'm actually no stranger to leaving Twilio - I first left in August 2018 after completing my internship, and then I left again in January 2020 to finish my master's degree. But this is the third time, and I don't know when I'll be back, if ever.

I have a hazy memory back in the Beale office kitchen, back when that office existed, and when the company was small enough that every new hire was introduced at all-hands. Someone was given a literal wooden boomerang, commemorating their return - as a "boomerang", they had left Twilio and later rejoined. As a double-boomerang myself, I got to hop in and out of incredible growth at Twilio over four real-life years.

I grew a lot personally. I learned so much about software development, DevOps and SRE, AWS and other cloud infrastructure, microservices (I still think about our own Galactica service sometimes). I got to be on the other side of the table when I moved to product management with the support of my management and teammates. I worked on or filed over a thousand Jira tickets, and almost four thousand Github commits.

At one of my first all-hands meetings as an intern, I listened to our CEO, Jeff Lawson, talk about hospitality: having something done for you, instead of having it be done to you. Twilio was a very hospitable place; people did a lot for me. From day one, I felt welcome and valued by smart people, and they took time out of their day to show me how it's done. It wasn't just the technical nuts and bolts. It was also how to treat each other, even in the face of a company-wide outage.

As I became one of the experienced people (I distinctly remember one day answering a question in Slack and realizing, oh wow, I'm one of the few experts on this topic), I tried to keep that culture going. Twilio was and still is a place where people are humans first, before their title or role.

There are so many people that I am grateful for. If I tried to list them and missed someone, then I would feel terrible. So just know: if we ever interacted at Twilio, thank you. I couldn't have asked for a better place to start my career.

Please enjoy this photo of me on my last day, clad in the most Twilio outfit I could put together.

As the pin of our CEO Jeff says - Onward!

Photo credit: Yee Aun