My Last Day at Alfresco Hyland

This story starts 10 years ago, I was working in Barcelona for OpenText and my career needed a change, i felt i was ready to do more interesting work. I had one eye on this very appealing open-source content management platform named Alfresco. I visited the Alfresco careers website dozens of times but i never applied to any role on their website, mainly because i had no experience with the platform and i was after a technical role. Surprisingly , i received a call from a recruiter asking me if i would be interested to join the organisation and you can imagine the rest.

What i have found in Alfresco in 2013 was mesmerising for someone that never had worked on a open-source company before. The values I was introduced to just felt right and the company vibration was incredible. I found everybody very busy, very engaged but specially very happy!

I got connected with C-Level key individuals in the organisation , and, for my surprise, they seemed to be available to EVERYONE. Being able to ask questions to the engineers or provide ideas to the CTO was incredible and hard to believe. In addition, i had access to the source code and i could build it myself ! Only one problem, I knew nothing about the Alfresco technology !

I was blessed with 2 mentors ("Gabriele Columbro" and "Maurizio Pillitu") that really made my life easy on a technical level. They were both Alfresco Black Belts, very experienced and passionate Italian technologists that helped me to learn, study and succeed on 2 very instrumental Alfresco certifications, the Alfresco Certified Engineer and Alfresco Certified Administrator. I also got the best manager in the world , "Amy Arms", a real leader that would do anything for her team, acting as a shield to prevent any negative energy or unpleasant subjects to reach the team, keeping the troops motivated (Something important when you are traveling the entire week to customers, sometimes visiting 3 countries in the same week).

From there, i had several great years of Customer projects, Events, Summits, Articles, Presentations, Coding, Benchmarks, Architectures, Fire-Fighting and much more, always having fun and feeling that i was part of something truly great.

I learned the importance of "Sharing" and "Give Back" in Alfresco. That helped me to shape my character, both professionally and personally. It also helped me to became the person i am today. I will be forever grateful for that.

After the Alfresco acquisition, things changed progressively to a different reality. As we know, sometimes with the acquisitions come redundancies and layoffs, specially on management roles, so i had 3 new managers that i would like to send by big thanks for all the lessons they helped me learn. Andy Wadsworth, Gary Thompson and Dan Rubin.

The last 2 years have been challenging for me in terms of adjusting to new methodologies of working, company strategy and processes, so i decided to move on and find something else, knowing that, i have dedicated 10 years of my life to a great platform but more importantly a great group of people.

I take this opportunity to send my huge thanks to the following individuals i had the pleasure to do work with, knowing that im missing a lot of names (accept my apologies upfront).

Darek Hulley, Jose Carrasco, James Dickens, Darren Devine, John Newton, Brian Remmington, Arsalan Minhas, Harpal Dhesi, Brian HoolBrook, , Alex Strachan, Miguel Rodriguez, Jose Portillo, Paco Olcina, Kevin Fenech, Mario Romano, Michael Chillman, Gabrielle Menkiti, Alan Smolen, Mehdi Belmekki, Sefer Akbut, Jose Machado, Raphael Kipster, Andy Wadsworth, Gary Thomson, Gabriele Columbro, Maurizio Pillitu, Amy Arms, Brian Long, Rich McNight, Alex Mahabir, Jeff Knot, Piergiorgio Lucidi, Richard Esplin, Preeti Nirvaal, Neil Reimant, David Gordon, Tom Wix, Corentin Roux, Dustin Roberts, Alberto Fidanza, Paul Hennessy, Santosh Pydisetti, Archita Raj, Angel Borroy Lopez, Philip Jones, Nic Doye, Paul Holmes-Higgin....

To all the customers i had the opportunity to help, thanks for your patience and may our roads cross again in a near future.

Luis