Lessons Learned from Four Months of Working Solo
tl;dr — After four months on the solopreneur track, I’m returning to work at Shopify full-time. I learned a ton about building Barkpass, but it’s not a full-time venture right now.
The following is a slightly edited version of what I wrote to help myself digest what I’ve learned, why I decided to do what I did, and what I’m going to do differently moving forward.
I’ve previously written about my first year at Shopify. At the end of 2023, I decided to leave Shopify and… not get another job.
I had been at Shopify for three years. My trajectory at the company had been pretty wild — from joining during the early days of COVID when the company had just gone remote and the stock was skyrocketing, to building on a brand new tech stack and collaborating with all sorts of amazing people in the open source ecosystem…
I won’t dwell a ton on what I was doing when I left — suffice it to say that I was working in an area where I lacked both experience and passion: low-level systems stuff, database materialization, database replication, Ruby application design and refactoring.
