15 Years at Liferay: Prologue

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics , the median number of years that people stay in a particular job is 4.3 years. I recently commemorated my 15th year of working at Liferay. It’s very…difficult for me to fathom that I’ve been at it for so long – and I don’t really mean that as a positive or negative commentary on the time! It’s just…a long time. 22-year-old me would never have dreamt, that on almost every conceivable level, I am where I am today. Truthfully, my feelings on getting to 15 years at Liferay are complex. Relief, pride, doubt, and even some soul-searching, are all feelings I’ve felt over the last few weeks. But the most prominent feeling, has been a desire to reflect.

Reaching this milestone has prompted me to reflect on my experiences at Liferay, and ultimately to realize how special they are to me. The totality of the last 15 years has been a broad tapestry of successes, joys - triumphs even, mistakes, sorrows, anxieties, doubts, anger, fear, and discovery (within and without). I have been blessed to have been the recipient of tremendous grace, patience, mentorship, and trust from people all over the world. People shared their lives with me and let me play some part in their lives. So, even with a non-trivial number of painful, frustrating, sorrowful, or otherwise difficult experiences mixed in there, I dread to lose even fractional amounts of the story to the memory-eroding passage of time.

And so, these reflections are my effort to hold on to that tapestry. I drafted an outline (read: mindmap) that laid out some of the topics and events I thought would be worth writing about. I started with a few goals for myself in writing these reflections:

• Remembrance - I want to write to help me to remember the last 15 years and what has been meaningful to me. Perhaps it will be meaningful to you.
• Reflections and Lessons - I want to document and share some of the most impactful and formative lessons that stand out to me from the last 15 years
• Gratitude - I recognize that going through this exercise will produce many different emotions - some positive, some negative. The place I want to land, in the end, is gratitude. There are several key people who have had tremendous impact on me personally and professionally.
• Sharing - I asked myself why writing about this on a publicly accessible medium was necessary. And, I guess, I want to believe that maybe some of the memories, reflections, or expressions of gratitude I share will edify you in some way.

Initially, my plan was for this 15 year reflection to be a single blog entry, but as I began to write, the mindmap grew. So, this is now likely going to be at minimum a 5-part blog series. Buckle up friends.

One final caveat for the series in general: what I write and share is not intended to be read as a purely objective or canonical retelling of events, but rather a collection of my experience of events limited by my memory, point of view, and maturity (or lack there of).

See you soon!

-jr