Farewell Capital One

Friday was my last day at Capital One. It was an incredibly hard decision to leave the company. As part of my day job over the last 2 and a half years I've had the privilege of working along side amazing people in various disciplines (agile, product, design, business development, legal, cyber, and architecture) and in various lines of business. To add to that I've worked with many passionate people in my side of desk roles in BIT (Blacks in Tech), Voices (Black BRG), TDP, recruiting, and various developer communities. I've had the opportunity to work on hard problems at scale, deepening my experience in systems engineering and API design. I had my first utility patent granted (with 5 more in various phases of the pipeline) marking me, officially, as an "inventor." However, one of my greatest areas of growth has been in leading people and fostering strong tech cultures while learning from empathetic, servant leaders like Justin Bachorik and Irakli Nadareishvili. I'm looking forward to continuing this growth (on all fronts) in my next role.

During the send off happy hour on my last day, my team had some surprises in store for me. We kicked off the zoom session and I found many of them were dressed in their best impersonations of me. Glasses, cardigan/blazer and t-shirt, and wonky software architecture zoom backgrounds 😅. Then, at the magic time of 3:45 PM everyone changed their Zoom backgrounds to reveal the team's new logo! On Focus we're on the Unicorn agile delivery train (because we get shit done, magically). The updated logo is donning some dark specs, a stylish cardigan, and reading a book with one of my mantras on the cover: "Stay Querious." I'm incredibly humbled to be incorporated in the team's logo and will be looking forward to celebrating future wins with them as they continue to change banking for good.

What's next?

For now, I'm taking a short break. I'm looking forward to writing some blogs (like this one!) and getting some time to decompress. I won't have the entire time to myself, though, as the kids are still in virtual school so I'll likely be helping out a lot more to give my wife some reprieve. After the break, I'll be joining Twitter's Ads API platform leading a team focused on driving adoption and building a core platform product to enable teams to ship products quickly with high quality. More to come on this!