Soon I will be joining the Buffer team!

I don’t know if you caught wind of me getting super excited about something earlier in the week or not, but now I am able to announce that starting next month I will be joining the Buffer team!

Buffer is a tool I have used for a very long time and has solved a real pain point in my life, which is why I got uncharacteristically excited when they emailed to say they would be interested in chatting more to me. I already knew a fair bit about Buffer and their open ethos, but after boning up a little pre-interview I started to get more and more keen to work with them.

I somehow managed to pass my technical interview (in my nervousness I completely forgot the best way to escape early from a loop in PHP) and at one point during this interview something was mentioned in passing about how Buffer conduct what are their scrum calls and something in my head went from “It would be cool to work here” to “I need to work here” - it was how much emphasis was placed on personal development. This is such a huge thing for me so it was music to my ears.

Next up was a cultural interview to see if it was felt I would gel well with the team and fit into the Buffer culture, the fact we were getting excited about the same stuff helped to cement how excited I was to have this opportunity to potentially work with Buffer.

Finally I got to chat to Joel, the CEO of Buffer, which, if you have been following any of the tech news recently was a very gracious thing for him to do as the entire Buffer team have been pretty busy with some, shall we say, unexpected technical debt.

How Buffer handled said incident was completely spot on and this is speaking both as a paid user of Buffer and as a developer. True to their culture everything was logged in the open for any interested parties to see.

Anyway, we chatted, I managed not to screw anything up and later on an offer was made - I found out when I was on the bus down to Dublin to see the Web Summit, I had planned to sleep on the way down. That didn’t happen!

Unfortunately I can’t work two jobs at once, which means that I am going to have to say my goodbyes to ExamTime, even given how awesome Buffer is this wasn’t an easy thing to do. ExamTime have been very good to me and have a fantastic product that is built and ran by a great team, they will be missed. I genuinely wish them all the best for the future, I think they will go far and I will be keeping an eye on their journey.

By the way, in case you are reading this Sunil, a simple break is the correct way to escape early from a loop, not whatever the heck I thought I was typing!!