On the 11th of August 2021, the tab with my email client in my browser changed its title to indicate a new email. This would be an email that would go on to change my life.

This email came from the CEO of Gitpod, Sven Efftinge, with a subject that simply read “Gitpod”. It was an invitation to jump on a call with him to talk about a potential career at the company, and when I read it, my heart stopped. Then my heart started beating at about 200BPM and I had to think rationally. I settled on believing Sven is a busy man and had to have mistaken me and was actually wanting to contact someone else¹. I couldn’t believe I would be able to get an offer from Gitpod, because I have been a really heavy power user of their SaaS offering for the past few months - therefore I was already a hooked superfan, so I needed no convincing for scheduling this initial call.

In my response, I spelled Gitpod as “GitPod”, which makes me even more surprised that I got the job.

I have taken a look at a potential career at Gitpod before, just out of curiosity, since I wished I could one day be able to work there², making this a literal dream come true. If you told me a week before this email came in that I would be working for Gitpod, I’d call you crazy.

Something great is happening 👀

(you’ll see what soon)

— Φlip Tρni🇨🇿 (@filiptronicek) August 17, 2021

Now that I joined and was officially a part of the company I thought only employed 2000-IQ senior software engineers who re-compile their kernels every Monday. Gitpod turned out to be… way different from what I expected. One-by-one I started to learn about all of my teammates and discovered that all of them were super-nice, kind, welcoming and supportive people in general. So nice in fact, that I’d for sure have no problem spending a week in Portugal with them³.

On the 17th of August, it has been exactly a year since I joined, and I now believe that being employed can be not boring. Sorry for the Zoomer-ism, but Gitpod is very Git-pog [1] and every day, I’m more excited to be doing the things I do there, and working on the things I work on. It’s true that I get pretty easily excited, but try to excite me for a year straight and that’s a tougher challenge.

I would like to thank so many people from Gitpod for this terrific year that I’d end up copy-pasting our Slack server member list, and my lawyer⁴ advised me not to do that.

It’s cool to see both myself and Gitpod grow and how different we both were back in August 2021. Although I do not believe I have made any difference in how Gitpod operates, I think I have left a mark on those who I’ve interacted with over the last year: albeit negative or positive (I strongly hope that the negatives weren’t too frequent :P).

To summarize: I cannot believe I am where I am currently in my career. A seemingly out-of-the-blue email which turned into so many great things that I could never capture with words, and one can only wonder how my life would be without. I am happy where I am and hope I can continue to create great stuff on behalf of this kumquat-colored company in the future.

P.S. Since I work on open-source full time now (I really work on 0 private repos!), you can always find what I’m up to on my GitHub profile (if you find any activity there not work-related, please don’t tell on me).

Here’s to another year of creating and maintaining valuable open source software 🥂.