Goodbye Foursquare

I didn't think I'd be saying this today but, goodbye Foursquare. As of 8:00-ish this morning PDT, my time at Foursquare came to an abrupt end.

I apologize if I ramble a bit below.

a bittersweet moment#

Foursquare's Infrastructure Engineering team was comprised of an absolutely wonderful, talented group of individuals who I'm happy to be able to call friends. Each of them taught me so much and together we were able to build some truly amazing platforms and projects. Our internal development platforms were mature, comprehensive, and constantly improving; managed by people who cared deeply about making them as user-friendly and intuitive as possible. I will miss the shared camaraderie and passion our team had to constantly make Foursquare a better place to work.

I highly value my time and experience working alongside them and am sad that, at least for the moment, those times have come to an end.

I wish my team smooth sailing on the seas ahead. It sounds like it will be a demanding path, but I know they're up to the challenge.

The same sentiment extends to the entire engineering organization at Foursquare. Engineering at Foursquare was full of talented people who were passionate about their work and always willing to collaborate and learn together. I wish everyone I had the pleasure to work with the very best.

things I worked on#

At Foursquare I spent an outsized effort to ensure that our internal platforms were robust, featureful and easily self-serviceable by their consumers. While some of those projects still remain outstanding, I remain happy with the work I was able to accomplish in pushing forward the velocity of the engineering organization.

I was able to kill off a few legacy systems too, some of which were created so long ago they had long-surpassed the point of having only a single-digit candle on their birthday cakes. Each of them posed interesting new technical challenges and helped me learn new things. Every day spent unraveling those systems' ancient arcana which had been lost to the sands of time (and Slack history) was an absolute pleasure.

I want to say thanks to those who put up with my (sometimes janky) ideas, and helped me refine them and see them through. I'm glad we were able to build cool things together, and stop the old things from paging us in the middle of the night.

about-me excerpt#

I'll have to update the about-me page on this blog now, but because what I'd written makes me chuckle I've immortalized it on this page.

I'm currently an Infrastructure Engineer/"SRE" at Foursquare. Yes, Foursquare. That oft-forgotten Yelp competitor that everyone used back in 2012 to find places to eat and things to do. Foursquare is still around, and so is the City Guide you remember from back then.

At Foursquare I work primarily with Kubernetes, helping teams migrate their workloads and ensuring our internal platforms are robust, featureful, and user-friendly. I love modernizing the old arcana within our tech stack; taking components with design decisions lost to the sands of time and bringing them into the modern age.

what's next#

I don't know what's next for me on the horizon. But whatever it is, I'll try to build something cool out of it.

Thanks for reading, and godspeed to those I was fortunate enough to call colleagues. I hope we can work together again some day.