Filip Troníček

Confused with Open VSX, VS Code and so much more @gitpod-io

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365 'podder days

Published Aug 20, 2022

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.

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 🥂.

  1. No joke, this was really what I thought at first. 

  2. I got so scared seeing things like “engineering interview” that I wouldn’t dare to ever apply. 

  3. I may or may not have actually done that, and it may or may not have been the best week of my life [1]. 

  4. I acknowledge that I do not have a lawyer