Lakshan Perera

Today is my last day at Nitrous.

I feel a bit ashamed that this blog went into radio silent during the past two years. But that was mainly because I was busy having the time of my life.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Bangalore to speak at Gophercon India. After the conference, I met with one of my friends to take a stroll across the streets of Bangalore. We stopped at a greengrocer and another shopper approached us. “You guys saved my life!” he exclaimed. I was awestruck for a second and then I realized he is pointing at the “Nitrous.IO” logo in my t-shirt. He went on to explain how his laptop died approaching a critical deadline and how he managed to quickly replicate his whole development environment using Nitrous in his family's Windows PC. “I have been convincing my boss to switch all our projects to use Nitrous”. All that in one single breath.

This was probably the most genuine accolades one can receive about their work. For the past two years, I've been hearing many similar stories. These made me feel extremely proud to I say that “I work for Nitrous”.

I know it's perplexing to hear someone wanting to leave the work they love and proud of.

Coming from a small coastal town of a lesser known island, reaching this level was not a fairy-tale journey for me. Each and every single little step felt as a challenge. Somehow I kept going out of my comfort zone, doing things that scared me. Doing things everyone around me thought as impossible.

I learnt a lot from those experiences. It bolstered my confidence. Yet, I feel I'm just beginning my journey and there's so much more to learn. And I don't want to settle with the easy path. This is the main reason why I decided to part my ways with Nitrous.

I will always have immense respect to Nitrous founders - Pete, Arun and AJ. They took a huge gamble in hiring me as their 2nd full-time employee. Someone outside of their immediate network. Someone they met only once for a coffee.

I got inspired by every single member of the Nitrous team. It was awesome that I could refer to these smart, disciplined and overall nice human beings as my colleagues. I don't believe in 10x developer myths, but I can surely say that this team made me a 10x better person than I was.

Leaving Nitrous means I will be also leaving Singapore. This part is even more emotional for me.

When I first arrived in Singapore, I barely knew anyone in here. Honestly, I didn't think I could survive in its vanity driven, snobbish society. It took me some time and effort to weed out the fakery and get in touch with the real people. Eventually, I found myself surrounded by bunch of awesome people who had similar aspirations, dreams, fears and tastes like me. For the first time in my life, I felt I belong in a tribe.

I will cherish some of the sweet legends such as how a small kopi chat turned into a full-blown meetup or how a programming language group convinced someone to switch their career.

To all of you whom I met, talked to and listened to in the past two years - Thanks for making my life awesome. Let's stay connected.