Back in 2009, I joined a startup that wanted to solve a problem around email archiving. At that time Amazon Web Services had only been publically available for a few years – with SQS, EC2, and S3 being a few of their very early services. This tiny company wanted to use the economies of the cloud to solve the problem of storing data for long periods of time. Being able to scale compute and storage as the company grew was a huge reason that they were one of the earliest and largest users of S3 and EBS.

TL;DR - You are not going to get rich at your startup. Well, you might, but the odds are about as good as winning the lottery. (So don’t make THAT the reason you go work at a startup)

Edit: If you want to skip this most and learn more about how startup equity works - check out this awesome Github repo: https://github.com/jlevy/og-equity-compensation

This whole thing started when I saw a blog post titled “Advice to Grads: Join A Winning Startup”. It’s not a bad blog post, but I was immediately turned off by the title, “Join a Winning Startup”. So simple right? Just go pick a company that is going to be a huge success, and go work there, make millions on your stock options and retire by the time you’re 40.

This was originally posted on the Threat Stack blog - added here for continuity.

DevOps is a term that has absolutely blown up in the last 5 years. As someone who’s been involved with that community from the earlier days, it’s been interesting to watch the conversations around DevOps evolve over time. For many people, they had an immediate adverse reaction towards Yet Another Buzzword – especially when the core concepts that people described as being “DevOps” were things that many people had already been doing for years. (I’m not going to bother getting into the specifics of “what is DevOps” since there is already a plethora of blog posts that you can easily find on it.)

There is an immense value to taking time off. It’s not something that can be measured. But there is something genuinely amazing that happens when you stop working. The most vacation I’ve ever taken while employed was 3 weeks. And I was only able to get that because I negotiated it in as part of my employment package due to an upcoming wedding and honeymoon. But even then, taking time off was much, much different than my most recent experience with Funemployment.

Friday, May 16th was my last day working for Dyn.

Monday (today), May 19th is the first day I’ve been unemployed in nearly a decade.

No plans. No job. No idea what my next step is going to be.