Team,
Friday was my last day at Tidewell Labs. I wanted to say goodbye properly, in one place, rather than one message thread at a time.
Two years ago Isolde and I sat at a kitchen table with a paper tide table, a pile of spreadsheets and a solver that took forty minutes to plan a quiet Tuesday. Most of what runs in production today still has my fingerprints on it: the tide-window model, the repair planner, and the test harness Juno still complains about. I am proud of that, and I am proud of the three customers that trusted us before we had any right to be trusted.
I won’t pretend I am leaving because the timing felt right. Some recent decisions about where the company is going are not ones I can put my name to, and I would rather leave than stay and keep quiet about them. That has been said to the people who needed to hear it. I won’t repeat it here.
A few things before I go:
- The solver is more fragile than the pitch deck says. Respect the timeouts, and don’t let anyone switch off the fallback plan to make a demo faster.
- Keep the plans readable. A harbour master who can’t read the plan won’t trust it, and they will be right not to.
- Look after the harbour offices. They took a chance on a company with no logo and a borrowed laptop.
It was a privilege to build this with you. I hope the next chapter is kinder to Tidewell Labs than the last few weeks have been to me.
Fair winds,
Osric