I’m Joining Shopify

4 years ago I joined ShareGrid looking to get out of Florida and do something new. My friend linked me to their job listing on StackOverflow and after a visit to Seattle and a few weeks of back and forth I drove across the country to move to Washington.

I'd like to drive across the country again one day, without the unhappy cat meowing at me for 4 of the 6 hour-a-day drives. I enjoyed driving through Tennessee, Iowa, and Montana. Route 212 through Wyoming with no signal and running low on gas was a little terrifying but beautiful in its own way. I saw a dead, half-decomposed cow on the side of the road. I thought, "That's me. That's me when I run out of gas."

During my time at ShareGrid I was regularly challenged to grow and contribute in ways I had no previous experience in or was unprepared for, and for it all I did grow and learned more about the direction I wanted to take my career.

Shortly after starting I maintained the platform for a few months by myself. Afterwards I started getting involved with interviewing for the first time to hire our next developer and I continued to be part of that process from then on. I helped figure out filling the communication gap between our operations and development teams. When we grew by a few developers at once I stepped up to start training new developers and start communicating our business goals. We were always a small unit, so we owned the maintenance and development of the entire platform and infrastructure.

Early in my career I used to tell people I wanted to get into leadership but reflecting on it as I've gotten older it's a little embarrassing how empty it was. I knew I wanted to help people succeed but didn't really know how I would do it, or what it meant to lead. My experience working as a quasi-tech lead at ShareGrid helped me to shape that.

I've learned a lot from my time at ShareGrid and created some great relationships out of it. Thanks for that, and I hope they see a lot of success in the future.

Moving on to Shopify is the next step in my journey. I'm going from a small startup that at our largest had 6 developers to a company shooting for a few thousand. I think this is the right move for me, starting at the ground floor and having the opportunity to work with people more senior than myself. It's a good opportunity to observe and find mentoring to continue my growth.

I'm ultimately looking to continue to hone my skills as a developer, get better at communicating, mentoring, and learn how to manage projects and organize developers in a way that'll allow me to bring value to organizations in the future.

I'll be joining the Revenue RnD team in the next few weeks, and I'm looking forward to meeting everyone and jumping into some new challenges.