Kieran PatelBeginning
Born. Learned QWERTY before ABCDEF. It would be another two decades before anyone was daft enough to pay me for it.
The stops so far.
UK
University
Intel
MPJDesign
Berlin
HelloFresh
Smartbnb
Lykon
Lanzarote
Lifesum
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. The palm trees were real, if imported.
First dev job
A placement year building internal software in ASP.NET and C# for Intel's logistics department. Thirteen months of writing things that people used on Monday morning whether or not they worked.
Met Edele
An Irishwoman with no patience for my nonsense. Fifteen years and three countries later, she still hasn't developed any.
Two-man band
Sole developer at a two-person agency: frontend, backend, servers, and the client on the phone about deadlines. Nobody to ask, no code review, and no way to hide a bad decision for longer than a fortnight.
HelloFresh
Two suitcases, four words of German, and a tech department of 35 that, three years later, was 330. Berlin was meant to be a two-year experiment.
Went into management
Promoted to Director of Engineering, handed ~23 direct reports, and left to work out the rest myself. I read a great many books that year and stole from all of them.
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 and DNA testing startup. Took it through a €10M Series A, learned more about investor relations than I ever meant to, and built a team in Berlin small enough that everyone knew what everyone else was shipping.
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.