He approached a couple members of my current team about the idea of open sourcing some infrastructure he worked on, and I think he was shocked to find that his efforts were not as appreciated as he thought. A bad copy of something better. He left shortly thereafter. I’m not sure if that was always his plan and he wanted to take some things with him, or if he was disheartened. But I know for sure that of he had left earlier he would have never heard that feedback and would have walked away feeling really good about his work.

For myself, I tend to want to know how we got here, wherever “here” is. I don’t need to have made a decision to learn from the consequences, but I do have to understand the decisions to some extent.