I’m joining Gremlin Inc.
I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining Gremlin Inc. as a full-time employee on March 1.
Gremlin is a US-based startup that provides failure testing as a service. Broadly speaking – and this is what I tell people who ask me about the new gig – Gremlin offers “a hosted Chaos Monkey on steroids” for injecting infrastructure and application failures in a safe and convenient way. The company’s goal is to help customers build more resilient systems and to train teams for operational readiness, in part by gamifying failure testing.
If you’ve been following my work, you know that I’m passionate about Chaos Engineering and the whole idea of improving system resilience by injecting failures. Joining Gremlin to build a product/business based on this idea seems to be the right next step for me. Besides software development (in Rust, among others!) and operations work (still AWS), I’m also going to spend a portion of my time on technical writing.
As Gremlin employee #2, I’ll be working remotely 100% from day one, enjoying the freedom to work from anywhere I want, but also facing challenges like time zones (I’m from Germany, my teammates live in the Bay Area). In any case, I’m super excited to start bringing failure testing to more organizations!
This new job also means that I’m going to leave Jimdo after exactly four years. Believe me when I say that this was the hardest decision of my career. In many ways, Jimdo was the best employer I ever had. This blog and my mailing list are a testament to the fact of how much Jimdo helped me grow both professionally and personally over the years. I, of course, wish them all the best for the future. Needless to say, I hope to stay in touch with my team in one way or another (<3).
As for moving on, I recently found this fitting quote:
There’s nothing wrong with moving along… regardless of whether it is self-driven or company-driven. Maybe we need new language… right now it’s either we resign or get fired. Maybe there’s a third concept which is “next”. Maybe we should simply recognize it’s time for next.
My personal next is Gremlin. I have the feeling that it’s going to be a very exciting 2017.
Thanks to Markus Zapke-Gründemann, Mike Adolphs, and Peter Schröder for their invaluable help in this endeavor. I learned that one does not simply work remotely for a US company.