Parental Leave (Michael)

Taking care of my family is the number one priority for me. Luckily, Andreas and I bootstrapped a profitable business that provides us tremendous freedom. Starting today, I’m on parental leave for the next six months. I’m looking forward to dedicating my full attention to my seven-month-old son.

Attentive readers will have noticed that Andreas returned from his parental leave only a few days ago. Enough time to ensure a smooth transition to keep our projects running without interruption.

In the last nine months, I was reminded daily about what Andreas and I created over the years. It is not easy to run all of that as a one-person show anymore. Not only our little children are growing. Our business is growing as well. So before I leave, I will share my highlights of the last nine months with you.

• We receive cheering support and feedback from our cloudonaut readers, podcast listeners, and YouTube subscribers. Thanks for all your emails, YouTube comments, and more!
• Our customers love the simplicity of marbot, our ChatOps product to configure AWS monitoring, receive alerts, solve incidents. I had dozens of onboarding calls where customers shared their monitoring challenges. I’m very proud of each new customer!
• I’m thrilled to see our latest product growing. bucketAV provides antivirus protection for Amazon S3. I answered hundreds of support emails and shipped new features in ten releases. It’s great to see a product grow based on customer feedback.
• I still enjoy working with our consulting clients. It’s mind-blowing how many different business needs can be implemented on AWS. Working with clients that Andreas usually serves was much smoother than expected.
• Maintaining our open-source projects is a lot of work.
• Writing a technical book is never done. We constantly update Rapid Docker on AWS, and we are working on the 3rd edition of Amazon Web Services in Action.

I’ll be back in July. I wish you all a good time! 👋