Good News, Everyone!

I am currently en route to Tartu, Estonia. This is where I will live and work for some time to come, in all likelihood at least a year, and probably longer. This is a radical change, but I have a smile on my face, because this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Monday is my first work day at Plumbr, an Estonian startup that pinpoints performance issues in your java applications before they have a chance to give you a world of trouble. I first heard of it from one of its founders, Nikita, over a year ago. I instantly liked the idea, and it has developed a lot since then.

I am really excited to get started, as I really believe that I can help make the product, and with it, the lives of engineers, a lot better. Also expect that there will be more tech blog entries from me soon, although conference appearances might become a bit scarcer.

What I Have Left Behind

After a year of working for Deutsche Bank, I have realized that such a big company with lots of corporate politics (and policies) and a competitive environment is not something that I enjoy much. There is not really much that I want to say on the subject. I liked my team a lot, and I liked my management for at least two levels up. That is not very representative, because I am convinced I was very fortunate to end up in this exact team (although there are people in other teams that are awesome, too)

With Leaving St. Petersburg, there is a number of great people that I will now not see as often as I am used to, but hey, we live in the twenty first century here. Geographical distance is not that much of an issue. After all, a lot of people who I enjoy spending time with are distributed across the globe, from Europe to US to Asia to Whatever.

On the bright side, I am very happy to finally leave Russia, with its… uh, mentality. I am not exactly a russophobe, for I equally dislike idiots of any nationality, but even after correcting for the Availability Bias, it seems to me that there are much more of those in Russia.

(If you are not much of an expert on Russian memes, I clarify that this is one)