You don’t leave somewhere you’re happy - Telepass Edition

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Today is my last day at Telepass. I learned a lot, met great people but I outgrew my role at the company and felt like we do not share the same objectives anymore.

It's no secret I am happy to leave. I hate it when people pretend like they are sad for leaving. You do not leave anything that makes you feel good. Be that a job, relationship or anything really. That being said, rather than focusing on the negative and pointing out the bad things, I want to remember the good stuff.

I was hired back in January 7, 2020 and wrote the very first line of code of what became Telepass Pay version 4.x

The pandemic hit Italy hard in March, and that gave me a lot of more free time to code. I invested those extra hours in building Telepass' application's infrastructure rather than working on a project of my own. It was fine though. I wrote some of my best code during that period. I built a UI design system that enabled us to seamlessly skin the application as we please (unlike android who fumbled this hard — sorry had to take a last jab at you guys 🖤), supported dark mode (that never saw the light of day — no pun intended — because someone a.k.a URBI did not do their part with the services tab), and centralised the behaviour of hundreds of UI files. I am really proud of that library. I wrote our network layer to enable us to effortlessly create requests and extract the response models. I built other great things during my time there. For the most part. Sometimes I had to do stuff I did not agree to, but it's understandable when upper management's promotion is attached to KPIs.

I'm actually sad I'll be leaving my iOS team. These are some of the best teammates I had. I didn't always see eye to eye with our team lead Fabrizio, but we made it work because he was down to listen and I knew his intentions were the same as ours, to build a great product, but he's often dealt shitty situations. I'll mostly miss Davide (no, not you Ruisi) and Gianfilippo since they are the two I worked with the most. You guys are great engineers. I wish I had time to work with the others more closely because Michele and Martin are funny as hell and Gaetano has a bright future - I think he secretly wants to be me because he tried to steal my bandana swag. And Ruisi, even though you are our punching bag when it comes to jokes, you're not all bad.

Here is a list of more people I want to send a shoutout to:

  • Lea, for reaching out when I was mad at the company and helping me control my emotions.

  • Daniela for giving me the idea for "fatti i cazzi tuoi". If we make a million, we'll take you out to dinner somewhere fancy.

  • Valeria for being a friend, and helping me build several projects. But you know, work faster please ♥️

  • Marta M. for being who you are. You're so annoying it's kind of fun.

  • Marta L. for somehow being straight edge and drunk from coca-cola at the same damn time.

  • Pallino and Nicola for being open to new ideas and building together that design system

  • Gea for going out of your way to help us as a PO and dealing with annoying people daily.

  • Enrico for leaving the iOS team and trusting me with it at the start.

  • Matteo for dealing with Ruby yet somehow still managing to have a good sense of humor.

  • Tatiana for that sale all'aglio. You're welcome at any barbecue party I throw.

  • Alessio for making "the call" when we had to deal with stupid APIs written by externals.

  • Lollo for being a big brother.

At last I want to thank Marco, Federico and Raffaele for believing in me and giving me and hiring me as the first iOS engineer to kick off what became a great team. I'm happy for your guys for getting bought out by Telepass. You deserve it. Maybe we get to work together again down the road. I want in on the company next time though, haha.

Oh shit almost forgot. I don't know who writes Telepass' LinkedIn posts, but whoever wrote this shit needs to get fired. This is embarrassing.