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Mitchell reflects as he departs HashiCorp

hashicorp.com

41–50 of 192 posts

Re: Mitchell reflects as he departs HashiCorp

#41
post #9

No mention about what's next ? Hm, why.

My suspicion is that he simply might spend some time with his newborn and enjoy life a bit after such a wild streak. He has more than enough financial resources to do that comfortably.

He has stressed twice in the post that most of his life revolved around that company - Maybe it's time for that not to be anymore - simply put.

Re: Mitchell reflects as he departs HashiCorp

#42

We've gone full circle! I originally launched Vagrant here on HN in 2010, which was at the top of HN very briefly for the day. Now here I am 14 years later witnessing my departure post in that very same spot. A strange experience! Thanks for the support over the years. A lot of the initial community for the projects I helped start came from here.

Congrats on what you've accomplished here. Building an industry-standard company and then carefully planning your exit on your own terms is a huge win. I (selfishly) hope whatever is next is still hacker adjacent, bc your work has been a big inspiration to a lot of us. Best of luck to you!

> I (selfishly) hope whatever is next is still hacker adjacent, bc your work has been a big inspiration to a lot of us. Best of luck to you!

You should check out the terminal he's been working on codenamed Ghostty [0].

[0]: https://mitchellh.com/ghostty

Re: Mitchell reflects as he departs HashiCorp

#43

We've gone full circle! I originally launched Vagrant here on HN in 2010, which was at the top of HN very briefly for the day. Now here I am 14 years later witnessing my departure post in that very same spot. A strange experience! Thanks for the support over the years. A lot of the initial community for the projects I helped start came from here.

Thanks for everything! I can't wait to see what you'll do next!

You and Armon have truly shaped the world of infrastructure with your tools and ideas. Although we never met in person (I only had the pleasure to meet Armon so far) - we've interacted a couple of times through some PRs and I really like you as an engineer. It's incredible the value that you created over these 11 years - not only on the product side of things (Terraform and Vault are incredible!), but also with all of your Go packages. The amount of time your name pops up in my go.mod files is just impressive :)

You and Armon are incredible engineers and I'm so happy you built something as cool as Hashicorp! All the best with the next chapter of your life!

Re: Mitchell reflects as he departs HashiCorp

#47

[flagged]

While I'm not privy to any insider knowledge, from the outside it seems highly unlikely that Mitchell had anything to do with the trajectory of Terraform for the last few years. Also, it's possible that he wouldn't be able to defend himself against such arguments, having potentially signed some paperwork with his former company.

Re: Mitchell reflects as he departs HashiCorp

#48
post #38

It is interesting to see how hashicorp went from an underdog company with vagrant to a company to aspire for with terraform, nomad, consul, vault to something that orgs and community dread, all within a decade. Standards that they have set are still industry wide relevant. But you can see they are on a negative path.

This is a weird take. If anything, Nomad, Consul and Vault are on the ascent, as the realities of the CNCF ecosystem set in for people with results to deliver.

The BSL licensing thing has turned off a lot of the more hobbyist/tinkerer-centric users who really rocketed HashiCorp's products up the ladder in their orgs.

It's a bit like Elasticsearch, I think—it's gotten big enough it won't be a quick death, but I don't see Hashi's products growing/dominating as much now as I did a couple years ago.

(As an aside, I'd like to thank Mitchell for his work over the years, Vagrant especially was huge in my infrastructure work, and Terraform was a great companion to Ansible and CloudFormation as we automated more and more stuff.)

Re: Mitchell reflects as he departs HashiCorp

#49
post #38

It is interesting to see how hashicorp went from an underdog company with vagrant to a company to aspire for with terraform, nomad, consul, vault to something that orgs and community dread, all within a decade. Standards that they have set are still industry wide relevant. But you can see they are on a negative path.

This is a weird take. If anything, Nomad, Consul and Vault are on the ascent, as the realities of the CNCF ecosystem set in for people with results to deliver.

Anecdotally, I've started transitioning more stuff from Nomad/Consul to k8s after Hashicorp's licensing changes. I somehow doubt I'm the only one.

Still happily using Vault for now, though.

Re: Mitchell reflects as he departs HashiCorp

#50
post #38

It is interesting to see how hashicorp went from an underdog company with vagrant to a company to aspire for with terraform, nomad, consul, vault to something that orgs and community dread, all within a decade. Standards that they have set are still industry wide relevant. But you can see they are on a negative path.

This is a weird take. If anything, Nomad, Consul and Vault are on the ascent, as the realities of the CNCF ecosystem set in for people with results to deliver.

Based on my limited experience Vault is actually becoming a niche tool. Big cloud players have been offering more limited solutions that are good enough for many if not most use cases. A few years ago as a consultant I'd unconditionally recommend Vault to my clients. If I were consulting today, I'd first ask what are they missing from KMS and Secrets Manager.
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