Kieran Patel Beginning
Born. It would be another decade before I found a computer worth breaking, and two before anyone was daft enough to pay me to touch one.
The stops so far.
UK
University
Berlin
Lanzarote
First website
Hot pink, written in capital letters, and saved onto a floppy disk because I hadn't yet worked out that websites live on servers.
University
Computer Science at Bournemouth, chosen as much for the beaches and the palm trees as for the course. Three years on the south coast is no way to grow up, but it's a fine place to delay it.
First dev job
A gap year building internal software in ASP.NET and C# for Intel's logistics department. Thirteen months of writing things people actually used taught me more than the three years of lectures either side of it.
Met Edele
Met Edele, and that was rather that. The best decision I've made and the one I deliberated over the least.
Downsizing
Sole developer at a two-person agency: frontend, backend, servers, and the client on the phone about deadlines. Having nobody to ask is a slow way to learn and a permanent one.
HelloFresh
Two suitcases, four words of German, and a job at a startup full of engineers who were better than me. If you're the smartest person in the room you're in the wrong room, and I wasn't.
Went into management
Promoted to Director of Engineering, handed 22 direct reports, and left to work out the rest myself. Management suited me better than I expected, once I stopped trying to do it like an engineer.
Smartbnb
Fully remote a year before everyone else got the crash course, running platform at a pre-seed startup. Built the infrastructure up from an empty cloud account, then evangelised event sourcing to anyone who'd sit still.
Lykon
Head of Tech at an at-home blood-testing startup. Took it through a Series A, learned more about investor relations than I ever meant to, and hired a team in Berlin I would take with me anywhere.
Moved to Lanzarote
Eight Berlin winters was plenty. We bought a house on a volcanic rock in the Atlantic, and I started taking my meetings with the sea out of the window.
Lifesum
Lykon was acquired and I inherited a second engineering department: two companies, two codebases and two ways of doing everything, merged into one while moving to event-driven architecture. The minutes will hopefully record it as diplomacy.
Got Ted
Adopted Teddy, a black rescue cat whose busted eardrum has left him with a shaky working relationship with gravity. He falls off things with total dignity and has never once acknowledged it.