Hello, Vesta

My first day at Vesta was three weeks ago—long enough for me to have some initial thoughts about joining.

Leaving Ladder

I wouldn’t trade my time at Ladder for anything—I worked with amazing people and grew into owning a big part of the engineering organization there. But it was admittedly a relief to have a clean slate.

• I averaged about 40 meetings a week in my last few months at Ladder; at Vesta I’m not even halfway there three weeks in.
• I had picked up lots of little responsibilities and obligations at Ladder much faster than I delegated them away—things like helping non-engineers with IT issues or incorporating Datadog and Sentry into my morning and evening rituals.

Onboarding

• Vesta is much smaller than either Ladder or Blend were when I onboarded there (which is a big reason why I joined). Because Vesta hasn’t developed a ton of process or company habits yet, there wasn’t much onboarding to do. It took me months to feel fully onboarded at Blend and Ladder; less than a month in I feel as integrated into the team at Vesta as anybody else.
• Remote onboarding makes spontaneous interactions basically impossible. Since I knew about half the team from my time at Blend, I made sure to spend some time with everybody that I didn’t previously know. With Vesta’s growth trajectory, it’s probable that now is the only time that I’ll be able to meet everyone on the team!

Tech

• Switching from Clojure to C# has been a little jarring. I’m still finding my way around best practices, language features, and even just IDE shortcuts.
• The C# development loop is a lot slower than Clojure—a file change in C# results in a relatively long build process and server restart (compared to just reloading the function into a REPL). Fortunately, we just migrated to the .NET 6.0 RC which has hot reloading built in. It’s way better, but still not quite on par with the feedback cycle I had working in Clojure.
• The tech at Vesta is young enough that there’s still a lot of foundational pieces that need building—which is super energizing!

Vesta’s been a blast so far, and I’m excited to see what future has in store!