While it’s only been 3 years since the last one, after 18 months in my current role, I thought this would be a good time to write another letter of thanks.
Some Context
If you’d like to know why I believe writing these letters is important, check out the first letter of thanks I wrote.
Since I wrote the last one, I had gotten promoted to Staff Support Engineer, did a stint as Acting Chief of Staff to CTO, and later moved over to the Office of the CEO.
A Letter of Thanks
Dear Reader,
Thank you for taking the time to read this letter. I’m starting to think I need to include a thanks section in my reflection posts instead of writing a separate thing, because it becomes difficult to remember everyone I need to thank. There are just so many people who I have to credit with helping me grow at work, and as a person.
If I missed you somehow, please forgive me, and reach out so I can add you here.
Becoming/Being a Staff Support Engineer
There are so many people at GitLab that I learnt from in terms of what it means to work at the Staff level, and who helped me get to the Staff level.
Of course, I have to thank my skip-level director Lyle Kozloff for helping to find the focus (Support Efficiency) for the path to promotion, and my manager, Ronnie Alfaro, who gave me advice on the direction, and the time and support to explore and do the work.
Even though the promotion process was rather different for them, thanks to Drew Blessing, and Will Chandler, who became Staff Support Engineers before me, for their time, thoughts, and advice.
So very many thanks to Lee Matos for everything while I was a direct report, especially being willing to trial being my manager, helping me better understand how to craft OKRs that align with the team/division/company, and the support and patience while I was dealing with health issues.
Related to OKRs, thanks to Jeremy Elder, Suzanne Selhorn, and Andy Volpe for sharing their Staff-lead OKRs and answering questions that I had around their process. It really helped me shape my own.
Thanks to the Support team for collaborating and supporting all the efforts/projects/initiatives during those times.
Speaking of collaboration, thanks to all the groups I was a counterpart for. The amount of collaboration, and the results we got were amazing. Thanks to the Technical Writing team for all the collaboration on product documentation, especially Jon Glassman for collaborating on a brand new page! (Support folks don’t normally create new non-troubleshooting pages.)
Special thanks to the Authentication group:
- Product Manager: Hannah Sutor, especially for agreeing to include Support prioritization in milestone planning, and working together on all those user mailouts (phew)!
- Engineering Manager: Adil Farrukh for always being super helpful and responsive.
- Product Designer: Daniel Mora, for bringing me in on UX studies, and design proposals.
- Senior Backend Engineer: Drew Blessing, for your willingness to teach and explain the myriad mysteries of the various parts of Auth, troubleshoot customer problems we’d come to you with, and all those pairing sessions. (I miss having them!)
- Senior Backend Engineer: Bogdan Denkovych, for all the collaboration on Enterprise Users stuff, and dealing with all the scope creep (I’m sorry!).
- and all the other engineers who have been part of the Authentication (and Authorization, formerly Access) group, which is too many to name.
Thanks to all the engineers who helped me with my code contributions, as I fumbled my way through some of them, especially my first one involving JavaScript and the related specs!
Support Driven
In relation to my Support work, I also want to take the time to thank a few people in the Support Driven community.
- Thanks to my Leadership Summit talk editor/proofer/cheerleader, Alison Groves.
- Kat Gaines for the great conversations, and the gold Pagey pin, which I still wear on my bag!
- Thanks to Youma Sirgi and Plain for the invitation to dinner during Support Driven, it was super nice to be in a smaller group.
- Countless thanks to the event organizers/volunteers/etc., especially Lizzie Keiper for being a ball of sunshine and friendliness, and for scheduling things to be less stressful!
- Organizers of the Aspire Mentorship program, especially Craig Stoss and Jen Weaver.
- Thanks so much Scott Tran for my current LinkedIn profile photo and being a great community manager.
- All the folks who were super welcoming in the Slack community and conferences, including everyone already mentioned, and Elyse Mankin and Susana de Sousa.
Write the Docs
Speaking of conferences, a small number of folks I have to thank in relation to Write the Docs.
- Even though they weren’t accepted, thanks Mike Jang and Marcel Amirault for working on talk proposals with me.
- Thanks to Tamarack Hockin for driving us down and going with!
- Big thanks to Amy Qualls, and Craig Norris (along with the rest of his team), for inviting me to dinner, hanging out, and great conversations.
Code4Lib BC
And the unconference in the list:
- Thanks to James Fournie for inviting me to help organize, and contribute once again to the GLAM world.
- Special thanks to Tamarack Hockin for encouraging me to present.
- Of course, thanks to the community for always making me feel welcome.
Acting Chief of Staff to CTO
I did write a separate thanks already, but here it is again:
- Thanks to Support management for giving me the time to do the rotation, and the team for covering.
- All the people who previously did a rotation and answered all my varied questions, and being a “sounding board”: Sean McGivern, Matt Nohr, and Sam Beckham.
- The Executive Business Administrators (EBAs): Jeanette McCarthy and especially Marisa Carlson for handling all the scheduling, and various other things.
- Interim CTO and VPs: Ashley Kramer, Bartek Marnane, Christopher Lefelhocz, Mek Stittri, Steve Loyd, and Tom Cooney, for their patience and guidance as this was my first time in this sort of role.
Office of the CEO (formerly, the Chief of Staff Team)
Even before I joined the Office of the CEO (OCEO), everyone on the team was welcoming of me helping out.
- Thanks Ryan Wedmore for helping to guide me through the OKR process when I was Acting CoS to CTO.
- It was always great to chat with you, Marshall Cottrell, especially to bounce ideas and see if we could solve our shared problems.
- Laurel Farrer: I super appreciate the time you took to share your thoughts, how you approached big problems, and solved things strategically during my first Internship for Learning.
- Many thanks to Ian Pedowitz for collaborating on the how to lead a working group MR before I even started my internships, and later for being my onboarding buddy!
- Huge thanks to Sid Sijbrandij for creating the CEO shadow program, especially for letting us sit in on chats with other CEOs, and in interviews, which is what got me interested in doing strategy and operations related work. And, of course, later, for being patient with me as I was learning how to be an effective member of the OCEO.
Once I officially joined the team, I learnt so much from the people I worked with.
- Thanks to Yin Yu for sharing so many insights, especially how you do program management, and keep track of all the deliverables for an initiative.
- Peeyush Anand, thank you for bringing me along for the ride on Project Panda, along with all the other collaborations.
- Thanks to Jeanne Rotenberry and Carla Silva for organizing us, and the team events.
- Dakota Dux and Renée Hendricksen for being great new hires, and having me as your onboarding buddy.
- So many thanks to David Tuan for being a great collaborator while on the OCEO together, and the past months, for stepping up to being my manager, and sharing your insights on how to get things done.
Add to that, the various people I worked with on the projects I’ve done.
- For Summit, there are too many to name, but thanks to all the volunteers for hosting unconference sessions, everyone who met the code challenge, and the events team for coordinating everything.
- Thanks to Sabrina Farmer for working together on the Summit Engineering Poster Session.
- Thank you, Jörg Heilig, for asking me to be our new Head of Support’s onboarding buddy.
- And Johnny Scarborough for asking questions and being willing to listen to feedback.
- All the people who contributed to the improvement of the handbook projects, including:
- the technical writing team members Amy Qualls, Evan Read, Marcel Amirault, Sarah German;
- the “escalation” team Mayra Cabrera, David Nelson, AJ Romaniello, Max Woolf, Filip Aleksic, Marcin Sędłak-Jakubowski, Arpit Gogia, Jaime Martinez;
- the code base maintainers Florian Forster, Michael Friedrich, Raimund Hook, Lee Tickett, Jaime Martinez, Marc Saleiko;
- and especially, my technical counterpart, Darby Frey, for all the things.
For the past 18 months, more than anyone, endless thanks to Stella Treas for being willing to take me on as an intern, then hiring me, teaching me so much about how to work in the OCEO and with senior leaders, always providing timely feedback, and all the support you’ve given me.
Thank you
I can’t say thank you enough to all the people who have contributed to my learning, growth, and desire to stay at GitLab.
Sincerely,
Arty aka Cynthia Ng
P.S. And thanks to you for reading to the end.
