Today is sad day as it was my last as an employee with EBSCO Industries, Inc. EBSCO has been such a big part of my life so I thought it would be fun to reminisce about my time here in blog post form.
I started with EBSCO over ten years ago as a junior .NET developer in 2007. Back in those days we were using ASP.NET WebForms, WinForms and Windows Services primarily. We were also a much smaller group back then.
Over time I have had the opportunity to help push our group at EBSCO forward with new technologies like WCF, ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, CSS, jQuery, Window Workflow, PowerShell and .NET Core. We have also changed our approach to architecture design/development with test driven development (TDD), service-oriented architectures (SOA), business logic in the business layer and developing with operations in mind. We have transitioned through many process changes from waterfall to iterative waterfall to kanban to scrum.
There were plenty of thoughtful and productive debates but I remember very heated conversations at times as well. Some were pivotal to our success others were ridiculous but in most cases both sides were passionate about being successful and making EBSCO better.
Two of my three children were born while I was at EBSCO and its the only job any of them have ever known for dad. They always enjoyed visiting me during the summer break to eating lunch in the cafeteria, play in my office and write on my whiteboard.
There have been several structure and leadership changes throughout the years as well. Most were for the better but usually hard at the time.
Overall, my proudest accomplishment in my professional career has been to see our group start and achieve successes on the journey to continuous delivery. The journey from painful quarterly deployments to trivial daily deployments across all our active projects has truly been amazing. We couldn’t have done it without everyone being open to new ideas and willing to experiment with the goal of continuous improvement. I firmly believe EBSCO has the finest .NET development group in Birmingham and probably the southeast.
I have been blessed to know EBSCO as home for so many years and will forever cherish the friendships I’ve made here and look forward to continuing them. I am better as a technologist, leader and human being because of the people at EBSCO who took the time to invest in me. Thank you!
I expect big things in the future from EBSCO and know they will always be successful as long as they continue to experiment, learn, improve and make it better every day.
I don’t expect this post to be super valuable to anyone in particular. Honestly it is probably more therapeutic for me than anything else. But I will leave you with the words I left them:
Don’t be afraid to speak your mind respectfully, stand up for what you believe with boldness and always be willing to lend a helping hand.