Thank you everyone!

Hi everyone,

For those of you who missed it: this is my last day as an Exercism employee. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who I've worked with during my time at Exercism. It may be a surprise to some, but it was not Exercism's many fantastic languages that got me hooked, but the community (i.e. the people)!

Soon after working through the Scala track in September 2014 (which was still Exercism v1) I joined the Haskell track. I struggled a ton, but with the fantastic help of the Haskell "mentors" (they weren't officially called mentors then, but their comments were nothing less than mentorship), I managed to learn Haskell step by step (and developing a fondness for functional programming that is still with me to this day). Seeing how I had benefited so much from the mentoring on my Haskell solutions, I started commenting on other people's C# solutions (which also made me a much better programmer).

Slowly but surely I was drawn into the maintainer part of Exercism. What started with a few humble contributions to the C# track quickly became my favorite hobby: working together with people from all over the world to help build Exercism. I spent many hours (even entire weekends) adding exercises to first the C# track, and later on the F# track. The next step was to engage in the discussions on the problem-specifications repo, which was just a wonderful experience.

During my time as a C# maintainer, I got to build a wildly over engineered test generator for the C# track (which I thoroughly regret now!), but the work on the first C# analyzer prototype was, to me, the pinnacle of engineering fun.

At a certain time in 2019, Jeremy asked me if I wanted to help build Exercism v3. I did not need much time to decide, quickly handed in my resignation letter and started working at Exercism in September 2019. The last five years I've been helping build out Exercism v3 and trying to streamline the inclusion of 70+ language tracks into the website. I've learnt dozens of new languages, some of which have become favorites of mine. It has definitely made me a better programmer. However, even more importantly, engaging with the community has also made me a better person. From the interactions with you all, I've learnt so much!

Unfortunately, the Exercism employee part of the journey has come to an end. However, I'm not disappearing (I'm not a magician after all), I'm merely returning back to a previous state: one where I'm a regular member of the community (with admin permissions 🤭) and where I'm maintaining the C#, F# and Prolog tracks. That means you'll still be seeing me around, and I assume I'll still get asked a lot of questions for a long time. I won't be as active responding to your questions though and most of the reviews will be handled by our newly introduced maintainer teams.

Overall, it has been an incredible 5 years and I wouldn't have missed it for the world. As I'll still be hanging around, I don't even have to say goodbye! I'd just like to say: thank you all for being the wonderful people you are. It has been my pleasure and honor working with you (especially Jeremy).