BaseUp

I moved to Sydney, Australia in 2019 because my best friend asked me to. After seven-and-a-bit years, a second intercontinental move, and more formative experiences than I can possibly enumerate, today is my last day. I’m leaving on great terms, with no regrets, and with a huge amount of pride for my work lo these seven years, but none of that makes the departure mundane. It is a deeply strange constellation of feelings.

A move from the UK to Australia might seem dramatic, but owing to my Kiwi citizenship, the actual logistics of moving were relatively straightforward. However, the less logistical elements still feel like something out of a movie.

Peter and I went to secondary school together. We didn’t really become friends until year 10 (age 14–15), at which point we shared almost every class together. We became fast friends after that and stuck together for the next four years, until the end. At that point we went our separate ways and lost contact.

One day in 2016, my mum was looking up teams in the Oxford/Cambridge boat race, and noticed Peter right there, rowing for Cambridge. It would be putting it mildly to call say this was a surprise, so I immediately reached out, as best I could. We hadn’t spoken for years, but I did still remember his phone number. (I’ve always had a penchant for remembering numbers, and I remember that one to this day.)

Is this still your number?

I didn’t have to wait long for a reply:

That depends on who is asking.

Touché. After this, we did stay casually in touch. Peter finished at university, moved to Australia, and ended up joining a pair of friends as a technical co-founder for a very early startup in commercial real estate.

Fast forward a few years after that to February, 2019. Peter is back in the UK and suggested we catch up for coffee. About 90 minutes, two coffees, and a gift of a very nice bottle of Taiwanese whisky later, I left with a surreal feeling like I may have just been screened for a job. It turns out my spidey-sense was tingling for a reason. A month or so later, Peter let me know that the company had agreed terms on a funding round, and were looking to bring on board a senior engineer. He encouraged me to apply, and I didn’t need much encouragement. And so it was that I packed up my life in the UK and took off for sunnier shores.

I can’t put into words what it’s felt like to be a part of this company. In so many ways it’s been the privilege of a lifetime, and my move to Sydney has in so many other ways been the making of me. I shan’t say that I owe it all to anyone, but I definitely owe a lot of it to Peter, to Alex and Jack, the other two co-founders, and to the other colleagues at BaseUp I’ve been able to trick into becoming very close personal friends.

When I joined I was a little worried about whether or not I still “had it”, whatever “it” was. My roles had transitioned more towards technical management than pure individual muscle over the prior few years, and it felt like a risk to switch gears into a role with zero management, and high expectations. Looking back in the rear view mirror, I feel fairly confident in asserting that I did still have “it”, and furthermore I’ve learned that “it” is a huge part of what drives me to perform at the highest level, and remains an important part of whatever it is that I do.

I’ve shipped a ton of code, and I got rid of a ton more. I’m sure I added a lot of shareholder value. I rewrote the booking engine, I added role-based access control, I added full forensic audit logging across all management APIs, I build the internal administrative layer, I rewrote the reporting infrastructure twice, and I never stopped making our database faster. There are entire models of how BaseUp works to this day that I got to design, decisions that will outlast most of the code I ever wrote.

The exact features don’t matter that much. What matters to me is that I feel like I’m leaving BaseUp in a better place than I found it. Ultimately, I think that’s all I can strive to do. More than any line of code, I hope that I made BaseUp a happier and safer place for those I worked with. I hope everyone got to learn from me a tenth of what I got to learn from them.

What’s Next?

I don’t want to talk about that yet! I’ve got a few (much needed) weeks off, and I think it’s an announcement that deserves its own time and space. But suffice it to say for now that this is something close to a dream job for me. A step into something completely new. Well okay, not completely new, it’s still software development. But it’s a new language and will be my first time in a company with a head count larger than 40 or so.

And it’s a company that’s been on my list of “places I reckon I’d like to work” for my entire career. The 22 year old still living inside me has been losing his mind for most of the past couple of months.

Now it’s time to fully indulge him.