It took over a year for the idea to boil up inside of me until I finally reached the decision.

3 1/2 months ago it hit me, I finally understood that I wanted to leave XMPie.

Before I started to look elsewhere, I notified my superiors, as I wanted to make sure that someone good would replace me.

It saddens me a bit that until now, two days before I leave, we didn’t find any adequate recruit to take my place.

After almost 5 years of working at XMPie, I’m leaving to work at XIV (IBM).

What I’ll miss the most of XMPie is the wonderful people working there.

When I started working at XMPie, I was 25kg smaller, with no formal education,but with a burning desire to learn as much as I possibly could.

I really feel that I’ve grown (besides the weight) in XMPie, as my path from a support engineer to a developer enabled me to learn so much.

Imagine what a wonderful gift I got, to be able to develop the applications I supported, it was a geek heaven!

Besides the geekness, weight, knowledge and experience I gained at XMPie, I still feel the same hunger for learning more.

That same hunger for moving forward, innovating and making products and workflows more efficient was also a part of the reason I finally decided to leave.

The most dramatic change will be to move from working with strongly Microsoft oriented, mostly web development, to work in a Python environment, developing with a strong tint of DevOps, integrating Jenkins and Unit Testing strategies, proper Git workflows and more – Geekalicious!

Over the last three years, I’ve strayed away from being 100% Microsoft oriented to a *nix guy (preferably on a Mac of course) and I’ve become a huge opensource fan (Thanks Tim!).

I’m really excited, as this is an extraordinary opportunity for me to be exposed to and learn many new (to me) technologies and methodologies.

Will I leave the .NET framework? I think not, I love C# as a language, and thanks to Mono, I can continue to hack on my opensource projects from any *nix machine.

Will I stop to have interest in web development? Definitely not, opensource to the rescue again!

I’m quite sure that a series of “Python for a C# Developer” posts will follow shortly.

Cherios!