One door closes another one opens

A forced farewell at Sonatype means a massively awesome hello to Trustpilot

You may have heard the, now public information, on what went on at Sonatype in early May, as reported in The Register. After a small time there I was sadly let go from Sonatype, along with other fantastic people in a series of job cuts.

I don’t really wish to dig too deep into this. FWIW I made some great friends there, and although the past month has been, as I’m sure you could imagine, hugely stressful, there is now light at the end of the tunnel!

I start work at Trustpilot on 1st June 2023 as a Senior Platform Security Engineer! This is something that hugely excites me and I hope I can make an impact there. I’ll be working under CISO Stu Hirst who is someone I’ve wanted to work with for a long time. Platform Security is a fusion of Application Security and Cloud Security - I think the skills I learnt during my time at Mimecast will come in handy, for sure! I am very excited and thankful for this opportunity at a company that seems very wonderful.

As for Sonatype, if I’m honest, the letting go was a relief. While I loved speaking on a variety of topics at some fantastic locations across Europe, I did miss home quite a bit. I think towards the end it felt quite hard.

For example that final few weeks I ran the London Marathon on 24th April, then flew the next morning to DevOps Days Geneva to do a talk on my experience of incident response on the fly on 25th April. Then I flew back to go speak at Cardiff University about Maven vs Gradle on 3rd May and then spoke about quantum computing at Devoxx Greece on 5th May. This was probably a lot more travel than I’d really bargained for and was missing being at the coalface too.

This is also why I’m really excited to get cracking at Trustpilot too. Being able to put my skills to good use once again.

Btw please forgive me for not writing up about DevOps Days Geneva and Devoxx Greece - obviously I’ve had a lot going on but I’m also waiting for their videos to be published. Once they’re up I’ll write them up!

Till the next time and here’s for the future!

Dan