No, I haven’t left Atlassian, but come Monday I’m starting in a new role!
We have the concept of a role called a “Shield” that’s essentially support but for helping our own internal developers and users (as opposed to external customers), and the idea is that it’s the first point of contact for developers who need help or have questions about the particular service/platform/whatever that the Shield is supporting, as well as being able to step back and look at the bigger picture in terms of pain points that those developers run into and what sort of things could be done to minimise that. The name “shield” comes from the fact that you’re essentially shielding the rest of the developers on the team from the distractions that come from other people constantly contacting them throughout the day, and letting them get on with what they do best (actual coding and improvements to the product). I’ll also have the opportunity to actually do some coding and make improvements too, though. \o/
The team I’m joining runs our internal microservices platform that an increasing number of our applications are being run on, and though the microservices themselves can be pretty much any language you’d like (it’s all Docker-based), the code that the platform itself runs on is Node.js which ties in rather nicely with all my learning over it over the past almost eighteen months.
I’ve been doing external customer-facing support for over thirteen and a half years so this is going to be a lovely change! It’s going to be really weird starting anew where I know next to nothing about the inner workings of the thing I’m supporting though. 😛 I expect my brain is going to be dribbling out my ears come the end of next week.