On Leaving Walmart
It has been an exciting three and a half years, but it’s time to move on.
Looking back, there is much to be proud of. We have produced massive amounts of open source code that have been successfully adopted by dozens of companies. We created an open flow of information on our production experience (e.g. #nodebf) that played major role in increasing node adoption by the enterprise. It’s amazing how our small team of 18 people had an amplified influence over the future of node. I am extremely grateful for the trust I was given building and leading this exceptional team. This was very much a team effort all around.
Our biggest and most visible accomplishment has been the creation of the hapi framework and its community. It is very hard to predict how an open source project will work out, especially one created by a corporation (and even more so when that corporation is Walmart). hapi’s success clearly demonstrates that by embracing the community and openness from the start, companies can reap valuable rewards.
We never said “we want to work with the community” because we considered ourselves part of the community. Over the last year, the vast majority of work on hapi modules has been done by people outside of Walmart. In fact, the shift has been so dramatic that we changed the entire governance model last year to encourage and empower this transformation. At this point, Walmart is responsible for a very small share of the resources maintaining the codebase and the community.
This transformation has been so successful that it is no longer a Walmart project – and that’s a huge win for Walmart. Walmart gets to continue to benefit from their initial investment by having access to a best-in-class framework, custom-made to suit their needs, with little to none ongoing cost. They planted and nurtured a seedling and now get to share in the benefits of the tree, cost free.
There were two less visible accomplishments (but equally impressive) worth mentioning. The first is the amazing remote team we built which can serve as a model for other companies to follow. When I joined Walmart, attracting talent was a major challenge. People interviewed with us for the sole purpose of getting a competing offer to leverage against the company they actually wanted to join. But by reaching beyond the local Bay Area boundaries and showcasing our work and community participation, we quickly became one of the most sought after teams to join.
The second is the culture of quality we created. Learning from open source and community management best practices, along with extensive investment in testing tools, we developed an engineering workflow that has produced unmatched quality results. What is impressive about it is how quickly it was adopted by others outside of Walmart and the hapi community.
It has been gratifying to see our accomplishments celebrated by the community and to be able to share our success with others through open source and public sharing of information. Walmart has been consistently supportive of these dramatic cultural shifts in attitude towards the outside world more than any company I have previously worked for. I hope others will use this example to push for change in their own organizations.
As for hapi moving forward, nothing changes. I will continue to maintain hapi and participate in leading the community around it. As I mentioned above, hapi has been successfully transitioned out of Walmart over the last year and is fully owned by the community that supports it. No one owns any trademarks or has special rights to the code, names, logos, etc. It’s all under the same open license.
There is one person I have to thank by name and that’s Dion Almaer – you won’t find a more supportive, generous, and inspiring person to work for. It has been an amazing experience and I am grateful to everyone who took part – we share these accomplishments.
As for what’s next, I guess it’s time to find another adventure (yep, I’m looking).