Leaving Schnucks, after seven and a half years
My first real job out of high school, the grocery company that took a chance on a kid who had won a website contest. What I will miss most is the people.
This is the one that started everything. The grocery company hired me as a summer intern in 2006, right out of high school, because I had won a web-design competition and somebody upstairs noticed. I figured I would be there a summer. I stayed seven and a half years.
I learned how to actually build things here: full-stack web work in Perl, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, keeping the public sites and a pile of internal apps running. Later I got to help stand up the first version of the company’s iOS app, which turned out to be the crack of light the rest of my career walked through.
But the code isn’t what I think about. Seven and a half years is long enough that your coworkers become the texture of your daily life, and that is the part I will miss the most. That is the whole thing, really.
I am leaving for a cable company and a full pivot into iOS. It feels enormous, a little disloyal, and exactly right, all at once. Thank you to everyone here who taught me how to be a person with a job.