Goodbye Catalant

Today marks the end of my journey at Catalant Technologies. Even though the end was unexpected, I have met so many great people and learned so much in the time that I was there. Some highlights:

• How to have a software product without a dedicated datacenter. Every developer could run the entire system on their desktop in Docker (with a subset of obfuscated production data), and when pushed to production “it just works”
• Super-short release times. It was not unusual that I’d finish coding a feature after lunch and it would be released before the end of the day
• Incredibly frequent releases. There were some days where we would release over 20 features to production. Coming from organizations that struggled to define and implement bi-weekly releases, this was a revelation and amazing to see first-hand a real-world example of releases as described in The Phoenix Project

Each of these is a big lesson, but probably the biggest lesson is that the “Principal Software Engineer” role has wide variations, not only between organizations but sometimes within the same company.

If your organization is looking for a problem solver with deep experience in software engineering using Java, Python, and SQL please keep me in mind.