I have retired from Booking.com after 15 years.

Dear Porters,

Apologies for posting about personal matters here on the list but
Booking.com requests that when senior employees leave the company that they
make clear in social media and other forums that they have left the firm
and no longer speak for the company.  This is my formal notice to this
effect. As of Feb 1, I am no longer employed by Booking.com.

I have left for personal reasons and would still recommend it as a great
place to work. I am incredibly proud of what I and my former colleagues
have accomplished and I am super appreciative of the many
amazing opportunities I had while I was there and firmly believe that the
company has a bright future. But after 15 years rising up the corporate
ladder to become Fellow combined with various family illnesses I decided it
was time for a rest and a change and to take time for family in the coming
months.

To those looking to join an exciting company that does a lot of Perl while
starting to break out into other technologies like Java, Node and etc, I
can heartily recommend Booking as a place where you will learn a great deal
and have opportunities only a few other companies can offer while working
in an environment that believes in a good work-life balance[1] and a
diversity of staff and views in their employees. I believe that our
developer experience teams and perl-infra in particular would be keen to
hear from you. If you want the opportunity to live in Amsterdam and hack
perl at a scale most people can not imagine then Booking.com would be a
good place to work; having Node or Java experience as well as strong Perl
skills would make you especially valuable to the company.

When I left the company we had over 40k modules amounting to 10-20 million
lines of code[2], surely one of the largest and most valuable and most
profitable Perl codebases in the world, and certainly making Booking one of
the most profitable and successful dot-com's in history.  There is no
question in my mind that some of the success of Booking is and was due to
the agility and flexibility that Perl affords, and the wide range of
software available on CPAN. I wish to send a large thank you to everyone in
the Perl community who contributed to Perl and CPAN to make that possible.

I couldn't have achieved the things I achieved if it werent for Larry Wall
and all the perl porters who have worked on the internals, and who have
collectively taught me so much. My time contributing to this community and
seeing some of the best developers in the world do their thing has been a
huge asset to me. In particular I learned an immense amount from Dave
Mitchell and Nicholas Clark and Jarkko Hietaniemi, I'd also like to thank
Chromatic for being the one that taught me that the only thing stopping me
from doing amazing things was the fear that doing so was too hard.  Liz
Mattisjen also deserves special mention, much of the success of Booking.com
is down to her contributions in the early years and the many amazing ideas
she had, I learned so much from her.

FWIW, to those who might be interested in hiring me I would like to let you
know that I plan to take a well earned vacation for the next few months and
I do not plan to consider any new opportunities until May/June of this
year. Feel free to reach out to me at that time if you wish.

I do however expect to be more present on this list in the coming months
and in this community now that I no longer have the heavy responsibilities
of being a Fellow at Booking.  In some cases I have disengaged from various
threads over the last few weeks as I was under considerable stress with
handovers and other matters.  My last project at the company was migrating
our huge codebase out of a unified lib tree into over ~6000 Bazel
"distributions" enabling our Perl systems to be built using standardized
Bazel tool sets, and this consumed a great deal of my time and intellectual
energy.   I will rejoin the fray as I recover my energy after an exhausting
past few weeks.

Once again, I apologize for polluting the list with personal matters, thank
you for your patience.

cheers,
Yves
[1] They dont stop hackers from hacking tho, so it's a matter of choice how
much you work. Some of us, like me, maybe didnt take advantage of this
aspect of the company as we should have. You make your own bed in this
regard.  But nobody is going to complain if you work a strict 8 hour
schedule.
[2] I didn't do a LOC count before I left so this number is based on a mean
of about 500 LOC per module. Booking has modules as small as 10 lines and
some as large as tens of thousands of LOC. The module count is relatively
accurate however (rounded down to the nearest 10k actually), and does not
include scripts and other material in our perl codebase, and of course
entirely leaves out our growing Java, Node and Go footprints.
-- 
perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"

• I have retired from Booking.com after 15 years. by demerphq