I had my last day at ThoughtWorks about 3 weeks ago. In my 5.5 years with the company I had the chance to live in 4 countries (Canada, China, India and England) and to work with and learn from some really amazing people. I think that ThoughtWorks is a great company with a great depth of talent and knowledge, a solid global culture, passionate leadership and a progressive perspective on the IT industry and the world. And I still find Roy to be an inspiring leader.

However, having recently returned from 6 months in China, I wasn’t really looking forward to the prospect of more travel. China was a great experience, but it sure made it feel nice to be back home. As there’s nothing happening for ThoughtWorks in Vancouver these days, work would mean spending a considerable amount of time on the road or moving elsewhere. Considering that I live in Vancouver because I love being in Vancouver, spending most of my waking hours away defeats the purpose. I also wasn’t looking forward to being an absentee father to my amazing one year-old daughter. So, it was time to part ways with the company.

For my last day, ThoughtWorks graciously offered to fly me out to Calgary to say farewell to some of my colleagues. Serendipitously it coincided with the office’s annual ski trip to the Rockies, so I got 3 days of fabulous skiing at Fernie in the bargain. It had been snowing heavily before we arrived, so there was tonnes of fresh powder. JJ and I had a once-in-a-lifetime run down the saddles into Lizard Bowl just as the ski patrol dropped the ropes.

In considering what to do next, I was pretty confident in finding local Agile consulting engagements in the city by leveraging my growing network here. I also had a burning product idea that I was thinking about tackling. But what I really wanted to do, and have wanted to do for the last 6 years, is to align my skills and experience delivering enterprise systems with the issue that matters most to me — namely, addressing the problem of global warming. Fortuitously, just as I started looking around, an opportunity came into my inbox via the Web of Change mailing list. The opportunity was with a local start up called Small Energy Group that is helping large buildings and institutions to monitoring their energy usage and significantly improve their energy efficiency. Several sets of interviews later and I’m the newest member of their team.

I can’t talk too much about what we’re working on right now. But we have a public release coming up quite soon, so I’ll post information about it then.

The company is located in (unassuming) Dundarave, West Van. I’m commuting back at forth to work by bicycle (one of these days I’ll post pictures). This is what my route looks like: