Today is my last day as a Google employee. After nearly 10 years working on the Google Cloud Developer Relations team, I’ve decided to step away and pursue other challenges.

Before Google

Joining Google in January 2015 seemed like a natural career progression. My first exposure to Google Cloud came in the summer of 2008 when I attended Google Developer Day. Google App Engine for Python was just released and it felt pretty special. It supported Python only, which was unusual at the time and this was a boon for the Python community in Japan.

I attended a workshop to develop an application on App Engine and there I met many people who would be long lasting friends.

Do you remember iGoogle?

In 2010 I became an API Expert¹ for Google App Engine. My fellow experts Eiji Kitamura, Takashi Matsuo, and Kaz Sato all joined Cloud Developer Relations ahead of me. Other friends like Yoshi Yamaguchi and Brian Dorsey also joined Google.

I had also been doing a lot in various developer communities in Tokyo. I helped found PyCon JP to run the Python conferences in Japan, and was organizing several IT meetups. So when I was asked if I would be interested in joining a new Cloud DevRel team, working in DevRel seemed like a good fit.

Joining Google

Working at Google was both magical and terrifying at the same time. I had never worked at a company bigger than ~600 people and Google had about 40k employees at the time. Google was basically my dream job.

I was also suddenly working with folks who had masters or PhD degrees from the storied halls of MIT, Stanford and other prestigious schools, people who worked at Apple in the 90s, folks making 6 figure salaries from the moment they left school, and literal celebrities in the software development world. On the other hand, by any metric I went to one of the worst colleges in the U.S. and had been earning peanuts by comparison up until that point. To say that I didn’t feel like I fit in would be a massive understatement.

The first few years of working at Google were a whirlwind of activity. In the first year I held events and gave presentations in 9 countries and 15 different Google offices, visited two Google data centers in Washington State and Taiwan, and attended the very first KubeCon (sched).

Over time I focused on many different products. I started out working on Cloud Bigtable and supporting customers in China and Taiwan. After that, I moved on to focus on areas like Kubernetes, Cloud Native Security, and Software Supply Chain Security.

Some of the highlights for me were working on the Open Source release of gVisor, and building SLSA provenance generators for GitHub Actions.

Challenges

As cool as many of the projects were at Google, it didn’t take long before I felt limited by my role in DevRel. DevRel leadership’s vision did not match my own vision of Developer Advocates as community leaders, advocates for end-user developer experience, and project contributors. I resolved to forge my own path by working on projects like gVisor and SLSA, and had some success.

gVisor as an open source project has supported several other companies in addition to Google’s first party GKE Sandbox. For example, Cloudflare uses gVisor in their Cloudflare Pages product and their upcoming serverless container platform which is used for their Workers AI and Workers Builds products. OpenAI also uses it to execute code generated by their AI models. SLSA has been adopted by npm for Node.js packages and in GitHub’s Artifact Attestations. The SLSA team even won a company wide award this year with a ~$10k bonus. I felt proud to be even a small part of their success.

While I felt that I was having an impact by contributing to these projects, it was becoming more and more clear to me that the DevRel role did not fit the kind of work I was doing. The feeling of impostor syndrome never went away. I felt powerless and stagnant. COVID and layoffs only amplified these problems.

Focusing on my Passions

So after much soul searching, I decided to leave Google behind and take some time off before going back to my roots and pursuing my passions as a software engineer. I’m starting by taking it easy, working on some open source projects, and visiting with friends and family over the next few months. I’ll be staying in the Tokyo area so I won’t be far from all of my local friends.

If you haven’t already, you can connect with me on Linkedin, X/Twitter, BlueSky, and, as always, via email at ianmlewis@gmail.com.

Thanks to all the folks I worked with along the way! I feel most grateful for your support.