In June I departed Bocoup, the open-source software engineering consultancy where I’ve worked since 2013. Since then I’ve been traveling, doing some contracting work and planning my next move, but I’ve also been reflecting on the extraordinary experiences I shared as a part of a very unusual company.

A little over four years ago I was offered the opportunity to join the team I admired most. It was literally a dream job—I had dreamed about it, though I never assumed I’d be good enough to join up!—and it’s been an absolute blur ever since. Even my first week was a whirlwind, and I would have been lost at sea without the mentorship of Adam Sontag and Darius Kazemi in particular, who kept me afloat those first months.

At Bocoup I got to work on fascinating client engineering projects, some of which lead me to become recognized as a noted contributor to globe-spanning open source communities such as WordPress. I helped to teach JavaScript to client teams, secure in the confidence that if I was asked a question I couldn’t answer, my incredible colleagues at Bocoup would know and could help. I learned how to participate in open source projects, work on a semi-distributed team, recognize and check my privilege, call out when I needed help; how to handle difficult clients, how to prioritize and estimate large, complex projects, and so much more. Somewhere along the way I learned Node, Angular, React, D3, and any number of other tools of our trade. I helped to create and deliver workshops on Backbone, D3, and Webpack. I learned how to design a good API, then contributed to a pretty widespread one! I learned how to analyze and visualize data, and what goes in to running a world-class data visualization conference. I worked with some of the best JavaScript developers (and the best straight-up human beings) in the world. And every single day I became a better programmer.

It is bittersweet to leave a place you’ve come to call home, but I’m excited to take everything that it means to have been a Bocouper and contribute that to a new team and to new challenges. I’ll have more to announce on that front soon, but in the meantime this post is a heartfelt thank you to Jory, Boaz, and everybody else I’ve worked with for these past few years. I’ll miss seeing roosters on every flat surface, I’ll miss being there in person to hear the terrible puns and wombinations (“word combinations”), but I look forward to seeing you all around on the open web!