On bleeding purple

Last night I was asked what was it like to have worked at Yahoo. I replied that it was a very loaded question, as everyone would have their own experiences, but in short, I could confidently say it was one of the best professional opportunities I have had in my career.
I was fortunate to join a small innovation team in Brazil back in 2011 that was empowered to make decisions and focused on building products following the Lean Startup principles and engineering practices like pair programming, test driven development, continuous integration and continuous delivery from day one. The team had already shipped Meme, and I joined a few months before launching Profile. In the following years, we worked on projects such as Messenger, Mail and Yahoo Mail for Windows 8 with other teams in the US.
The team was recognized with several awards (including the You Rock and Yahoo Super Star awards) and eventually relocated to the headquarters in Sunnyvale to work on Search for iOS, Android and Mobile Web.

All companies go through many ups and down, but over the course of my 4.5 years working there, my experience was great, and I feel extremely proud of everything I worked on and thankful for the opportunities that were given to me and the teams I was part of. I met and worked with really awesome people and learned a lot about building systems at scale, connecting with users to improve their experience, accessibility, performance, experimentation and much more.
It has been 16 months since I left the ‘Hoo, but every time I see the giant Yahoo! billboard in San Francisco, use any of the products or talk to friends about the company, it brings back all the positive memories of my tenure there and reminds me that I will always bleed purple.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on July 28, 2017.
