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I’m very sad to announce that January 14th will be my last full work-day with EXLRT. On January 17th, I’ll be joining Red Hat as a Senior Drupal Developer. So I’m not just leaving my company, I’m leaving a little tiny sector of an industry that I’ve been active in for 11 years.

It All Started at a Hospital

In July of 2010 I left a company I’d worked at for five years (Mannatech) to be a business analyst at Children’s Medical Center of Dallas. There I met Mihai Cadariu, Kelly Thompson, and I’m pretty sure Freddi Lugo. At Children’s I learned all about documentation, templating, blueprints, schemas, and publishing; all sorts of fun Tridion kinds of things. I also wrote a lot of CSS for a social network which was my first actual, “write code for your job” experience.

Then it Grew at Tahzoo

From Children’s I hopped to Tahzoo and became a technical consultant. I had to break down some stereotypes that all HTML+CSS people are designers at the start. I learned JavaScript on the job and then moved right into Razor. Eventually I found out that Razor was C#, and that smoothed my transition into getting comfortable with C# and .net.

I began at Tahzoo as a guy who knew HTML and CSS, and left as a principal architect who’d developed full-stack applications and designed the architectures for Tridion implementations.

Five of my six Tridion MVP awards happened at Tahzoo. That’s a testament to how much I learned and how much I felt I needed to share.

And I’m closing it out at EXLRT

Here at EXLRT I’ve done some awesome stuff, and quite a bit of it wasn’t even Tridion related:

• I’ve built Node Azure functions,
• debugged React apps,
• deployed Azure logic apps,
• created NPM libraries,
• developed the front-end for Kentico sites,
• created Vue apps for content authors,
• and even made a GUI extension.

It’s a lot of different stuff and not all of it even had to do with content management. I really love working at EXLRT and I’m going to miss so many of the folks who weren’t just co-workers, but friends. Big thanks to Brandon Bernard, Dario Opacek, Petar Begovic, Vuk Cuvardic for their companionship on some fun projects.

Onward to Red Hat

The hardest thing with leaving EXLRT is that I absolutely wasn’t planning on it. A friend (Wes Ruvalcaba) reached out to me from Red Hat and within a week I’d had multiple interviews accompanied by an amazing offer that I couldn’t refuse.

At Red Hat I’ll still work within content management, but instead focus on Drupal. For the first time in my career, I’ll be focused on a single product at a single company. It’s pretty wild to be excited about all these things, but now that I’m in my 40’s and have three kids, I’m ready for it.