Kieran Patel
Beginning
Born. Spent the next couple of decades mostly not writing software, which in hindsight was a tactical error.
The stops so far. Spacing is topological, not to scale — the quiet early years get a little room, the busy stretches get more.
UK
University
Berlin
Lanzarote
First website
It was hot pink, written in `<ALLCAPS HTML>`, and I "deployed" it on a floppy disk because I didn't know how web servers worked.
University
Computer Science, but just as importantly, in Bournemouth with its beaches and palm trees, making the most of the south coast of the UK.
First dev job
Gap year job making internal software (ASP.NET / C#) for Intel's logistics department. Learned more in these thirteen months than three years of uni.
Met Edele
Joined forces with Edele, my partner in crime ever since. Against all reasonable expectations, she's still putting up with my nonsense.
Downsizing
Became the sole, fullstack developer at a two-person agency. Nobody to lean on for help and clients chasing deadlines meant I had to figure it out the hard way.
HelloFresh
A startup job offered opportunity to learn from talented engineers. Packed two suitcases, learned roughly four words of German, and started again in a new city.
Went into management
Promoted to Director of Engineering, given 22 direct reports and again had to figure it out the hard way. Turns out the hardest bugs are the ones that have feelings.
Smartbnb
Went fully remote before it was fashionable, running platform for a pre-seed startup. Built the whole infrastructure from an empty cloud account, then evangelised event sourcing to anyone who couldn't leave standup fast enough.
Lykon
Head of Tech at an at-home blood-testing startup. Took it through a Series A (learning a lot about investor relations as I went) and built the best little tech team Berlin has ever seen.
Moved to Lanzarote
Eight Berlin winters was enough for us. Bought a house on a volcanic rock in the Atlantic and started taking meetings with a sea view. The commute is now roughly nine steps.
Lifesum
Lykon got acquired and I inherited a second engineering department. Merging two companies, two codebases and two ways of doing everything into one — with a refactoring to event-driven systems and what the meeting minutes hopefully recorded as diplomacy.
Got Ted
Adopted Teddy, a black rescue cat with a busted eardrum and, as a result, a shaky working relationship with gravity. Falls off things with immense dignity and roughly triples my commute with attempts to trip me up.