I'm joining Mend to work on Renovate full-time

I'm very excited to announce that in September, I'll be joining Mend to work on the Mend Renovate CLI (the Open Source project commonly known as "Renovate") 🚀

Readers of my blog will be unsurprised that I was ecstatic to get the opportunity to join the team working on Renovate - Renovate is a project I've been working with for about ~6 years, got a tonne of joy out of, kept a load of software up-to-date, had viral blog posts (and many other opportunities to blog) and it built the foundation for dependency-management-data and other powerful insights into things you can do if you have better dependency data than any of the other competing options.

It's bittersweet to be leaving Elastic after a couple of years, and I've found I'm reflecting a lot on the outsized impact I've had - especially as I've been receiving many "we'll miss you" messages

Throughout my time - as per usual - I've been keeping my CV up-to-date so you can see what sort of things I've been able to publicly share about what I've been working on, as well as there being a tonne of things I've not shared (for brevity or organisation-specific details). I'm really proud of the positive impact I've made on Platform Engineering Productivity, the Elastic Go community, and a number of different areas that will improve the lives of engineers at the organisation.

I'm really glad for the opportunities and support I've had over the last couple of years!

Looking for a new job

I've been on the eye out for a new job since some organisation changes at Elastic in February.

Unfortunately the job market isn't particularly great right now, hence the slightly long lead up, which has not been helped by a lot of large companies doing layoffs, or "we can outsource to AI!", which means that on top of the regular attrition and movement in the industry, there's also a lot more folks looking for jobs, not to mention companies being a bit more careful with hiring due to geopolitics impacting the stock markets.

I also didn't want to particularly hop to the next job "for the sake of it" - for the most part things at Elastic have been fine enough to stay a little longer, and I wanted to make sure I was taking the right "next step" in my career.

To help centre what I wanted to do next, I broke my criteria down on my CV page, so I could have a single reference point for conversations with recruiters.

With this in mind, I've been fairly picky, trying to optimise for ☝🏼️ which meant that I was a bit more selective with applications. I ended up making my way through a few processes that I ended up dropping out fairly late stage, as I realised it wasn't exactly for me - there were a number of great companies I've been talking to, but none of them quite hit all the things I wanted.

(I was also somewhat skewed in my applications, as there was a company that I'd spoken to who had a mutual want for me to work with them. This company ticked ~95% of the above requirements, and seemed like a great opportunity, but unfortunately the role that was promised didn't end up materialising, which is a shame)

In retrospect, I think it's good I didn't end up accepting anything, as I'd be significantly kicking myself if I'd ended up taking a job and then seeing that this role on the Renovate maintainers team was available!

Over the months since February, I've been interviewing at a few companies, but nothing ended up quite working out.

In July, Anna and I had a week off - which we'd been looking forward to for a bit - and there'd been a ramping level of burnout creeping in, and I'd started considering whether I should stick with Elastic for a bit longer (as I've mostly been working on some good stuff with some great people) and see if anything else pops up in the meantime.

The week before going away, there was a meeting that made me wonder about rethinking that decision, but I ended up deciding that I was going to stay through the end of the year.

The day before we went away for a few nice days in Brussels, I got a message from Rhys, the creator of Renovate, to see if I wanted to chat about a role opening up.

I'd last spoken to Rhys ~3 years ago when the last space in the team came up, but at the time I wasn't looking at moving jobs, having recently joined Deliveroo. At this point, I was very much ready for the move, and so jumped at the opportunity to discuss what that would look like.

Joining Renovate as a maintainer

As y'all may be aware now, Rhys is stepping back from Renovate for a bit, and so a large amount of my role will be working on the community management work he's been doing around the Open Source project, as well as contributing towards internal work on the Renovate Enterprise Edition.

I've said before that I'm a very big fan of the way that the Renovate community is managed, and the way the project has grown organically to help better support contributions and questions, and it's something I've taken inspiration from for oapi-codegen, so I'm looking forward to seeing it firsthand, from the maintainer's point of view.

I'm very much looking forward to working on a mix of Open Source and the Enterprise offerings, as there's a number of things I've learned in the years of running Renovate (including at Enterprise scale!) as well as with my work on Dependency Management Data about the different things Enterprises need out of their dependency management.

I'm also looking forward to continuing to work remotely, and continuing to improve some of my asynchronous working habits - and to meet all my team before too long.

FAQs

What does this mean for Dependency Management Data?

I'll be putting a pause on my work on Dependency Management Data for the foreseeable future.

This was a tough decision, given the huge benefits I've found from being able to understand significant insights about dependency usage, and the companies that have found the benefits of my work.

However, a number of these powerful insights or means of querying more effectively are absolutely features that can then be built into the value proposition for things like Renovate Enterprise Edition, making it an even better sell for large companies, who are exactly looking for some of these features.

Dependency Management Data is still very much in a state that it can be used, and if anyone else is interested in getting involved in picking up maintenance, please drop me a message!

What does this mean for oapi-codegen?

Nothing will change - I'll be continuing to work on it in my free time.

It will mean I'll be losing the 4hr/month that Elastic were paying for, and we're discussing converting them into a 1hr/mo sponsor.

Considering that Dependency Management Data and Renovate "free time" projects will be removed, it'll free up more space - don't quote me on this, but it should mean I have a bit more space for oapi-codegen.

What does this mean for my blog?

Very little! I may be blogging a little less about Renovate itself - instead focussing on direct improvements to the Renovate docs, or posts that land on the official Mend blog, but otherwise you'll get the same level of blogging overload that you get with me.

Closing

My time at Elastic, working on Engineering Productivity was great - I've made some great positive impact, caused a couple of incidents I probably shouldn't have (🙈), worked with some great folks who I'm sad to be leaving, and I feel I've "pushed the needle" to make engineering a bit more productive, on the whole.

I'm very much looking forward to this next chapter in my career - working on a project I've thoroughly enjoyed working with and benefited from, and super looking forward to being a paid Open Source maintainer 🚀

I want to say another massive thank you to Rhys and Justin for championing me for the role 💜