Today is both a sad and happy day for me. It was my last day working at Typemock. Starting January, I’ve decided to go on a new journey. More on that in the next post.

I’ve been at Typemock exactly three years, the last couple of years as Chief Architect. Joined January 3 years ago, and leaving just when the leasing on my company car has run out. During those 3 years I’ve learned so much It will be hard to describe it in one post, but I’ll try.

I’m proud to have helped ship several new products and versions of those products during my stay:

• Isolator++, the ultimate Isolation framework for C++;
• Test Lint, a just-in-time test review extension for visual studio;
• Racer, for finding deadlocks in .net threads
• TeamMate, for measuring the effectiveness of your unit testing strategy
• and of course Isolator for .NET in its new and fluent API for both C# and VB.

During the past three years I’ve learned, among other things, a better meaning and essence of team leadership, product management, team management techniques, productization and post-deployment thinking, working with contractors, true pair programming, ScrumP (Scrum+XP) in real life, and many more things I’ve neglected to write in my book.

I’d like to think that not only did I learn many things, but that, together with a bunch of extraordinary developers, we’ve helped shape and change the state of the art in unit testing in .NET, and most recently in C++.

It started out very differently.

The main reason I chose to work at Typemock was one you might raise an eyebrow at: I was not a big supporter of Typemock at the time, and in fact, felt that it could make things worse for the unit testing community by encouraging bad design.

I also knew that it’s the easiest thing in the world to stand at the sidelines and judge something you don’t understand fully, so I decided to jump head first into the opportunity that came upon me: Eli Lopian, the CEO of Typemock, knew me from consulting at his company with their efforts for TDD. When he left there to start Typemock, he offered me a job there. I thanked him and said “no”. I was dong something else at the time. But a year or so later, I called him up and said I want to be part of it.

I really wanted to understand what is it that I don’t understand about this product and its abilities. What better way to learn that than to spearhead the development of said product? At worst, I would find out that I was right. At best, I would learn something new. And that’s what happened.

I realized this product makes a real difference for people stuck in bad code and bad companies. It’s a bridge, a way out into agility. at least, into the start of agility. And it can change people’s lives for the better.

So I’m happy I did it, and I still believe this to be true. I’m leaving because I want to learn new things, but I ‘d still highly recommend Typemock to people struggling with such issues. The future holds great things for this company, if Eli can keep it focused and poised at its targets.

The developers at Typemock

..are some of the best I’ve gotten the chance to work with, but it was a process getting there. We all learned a lot about ourselves and about how we work, and I feel privileged to be part of that learning process.  Doron, Gil, Dror, Ohad, Igal – it’s been a pleasure. Anna, Elisha, Idan – I wish we could have worked more together!

Eli – Thanks for helping shape who I am and what I know today. You are one of the best CEOs I’ve seen (and I’ve been to quite a few startups). They are lucky to have you guiding them!

Thanks for all the fish! I’m moving to a different ocean for a while.