RallyDev.com
Thu 13 Oct 2011
Eight Years
It’s true. I’ve been working at Rally for over eight years. Yeah, I know. I should have posted something on the blog long ago, but there’s no better time to start than the present, right?
Rally took a pretty big gamble on me. When I was hired as a developer, I had just graduated from CU and had never written a line of production code. I had written code, but most of it was writing test automation in SQABasic (*shudder*), VB, and Java and at Rational Software. Luckily, I knew a couple of the members of the Rally (then F4Tech) engineering team at the time, and got my foot in the door by applying for an automated testing position. During the interview process, I was asked what I really wanted to do, and I replied that my true passion was in development. The rest, as they say, is history.
I had no choice but to learn fast. We were all learning and exploring various technologies, not to mention trying to figure out how to get good at agile software development. Still, I had to get up to speed on J2EE and web technologies in general. We were also using WebLogic Portal at the time, which had it’s own set of tools and conventions. The trial by fire approach worked well for me, and over time I increased my depth and mastery of web application development and testing.
Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of working on all areas of the stack and on many features that our customers know and, well, mostly love. Most recently, I worked on the new menus that replaced the ones that I wrote years ago. And while it is a little humbling to see my some of my old code featured on some of our “what not to do” blog posts, I appreciate the opportunity to reflect on how far I’ve come in both skill and experience.
Rally has truly enabled me to create my own reality. From humble beginnings, I am now a development manager and work with others to both shape and realize the architectural vision of our products. All the while, I am still able to immerse myself in code on a regular basis and continue to create new and exciting features for our customers.
It has been an amazing eight years. Here’s to many more.
As someone who hasn’t been at Rally very long one thing stands out as amazing to me – I had no idea Will had been here 8 years. It’s hard to tell really how long anyone has been here because the culture supports new and “old” folks contributing in similar ways. It’s great to hear the experience of someone who’s been here a while and is still very passionate about what they do. Great post!