Leaving Claranet

Today is my last day at Claranet, who acquired Bashton Ltd almost 2.5 years ago.

I'm not normally one for looking back, preferring to focus on the future, but I think it's right to call out a few people without whom the business wouldn't have been such a success.

Firstly, to the customers who believed in us, especially when we were a relatively small company without much of a track record.

Next of course, all the Bashton team. The most enjoyable part of my job has always been working with some incredibly intelligent and creative people who are able to come up with unique solutions to problems. That we have all grown and learnt together has been massively rewarding.

Lastly, I'd like to mention a couple of people who had a large impact on the success of Bashton, directly and indirectly.

Josie Jakub, who at the time she worked us was a marketing manager with Amazon Web Services. As a small company based outside of London, our early engagement with AWS was sometimes difficult. Josie took the time to come and visit us regularly, to explain to a group of technically minded people how marketing worked, and gave us the means to very much accelerate our growth.

Luke Kanies, creator of Puppet. Bashton Ltd was an early adopter of Puppet, and once we understood the power of a configuring everything through a declarative language moving to becoming a 'cloud' company was a pretty obvious step. It's no exaggeration to say Puppet changed the way I thought and continue to think about computers, and by releasing Puppet as Open Source software, Luke and the Puppet community have made a significant contribution to the world of computing.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone I've worked with over the last 14 years, and I wish Claranet every success in the future.