Winfield Peterson: Object Oriented Pragmatism

Leaving PatientsLikeMe

I’m sad to announce I’m leaving PatientsLikeMe for a new opportunity. I joined PatientsLikeMe to work with great people, grow the team/architecture, and help some very sick people. Like any startup, it’s been a roller coaster of joy and despair.

Two and half years later, it’s hard to believe we’ve crossed all the ambitious projects off the list we sketched out when I first started:

• Establish Minimal Scrum/Kanban and Grow the Team
• Rebuild the Production Stack for Speed/Reliability
• Overhaul the Medical Data Architecture
• Embrace Devops with Monitoring
• Ship Features as Efficiently as Possible

Why Leave?

It’s time to pass the different torches to engineers on my team and start something new. There’s still more work to do, but I’m excited to let my team step up and take my roles. It’s hard to leave a comfortable job, but you have to challenge yourself if you want to grow.

Joining AppCloud

I’ve taken a role as a Principal Engineer on the AppCloud product within BrightCove. They’re building a distributed, large scale system delivering mobile applications as a service. I’m excited to work with Ashley Streb, Scott Tamosunas, and everyone on a great team. I hope to bring Rails, Resque, and engineering experience to bear on day 1 while learning Mongo, Mobile, and BackboneJS among other new technologies.

The Future

It’s always sad to leave great people behind, but I hope I’ll see everyone from PatientsLikeMe on a regular basis – it’s a small town. I’m very excited to get my hands dirty and help launch AppCloud!