Silke

This is a love letter, to my old employer. It just seems fitting.

Hey,

It’s my last day. And weirdly, I am sad. Melancholic, even.

How long has it been? Nine years and a month? Wow, imagine that. This is one of the longest relationships I had, not considering family. Nine years is a long time. Long enough to change jobs, hairstyles, opinions, priorities, and probably several passwords. Somehow, we stayed through most of it. And maybe this is what makes me sad. I am, in a sense, leaving a place that has become a part of who and what I am now.

I had the best time, I must say. Not all the time, sure. But in all those years? I met a lot of nice friends and colleagues. I had awesome milestones, ridiculous moments, challenging events and treasured highlights.

Remember when I started? I actually looked like a weirdo, I think. I destroyed stuff, found bugs, did a lot of weird things. Like that service window that was only for ~20 minutes per day. Just to test out SLAs and whatnots. But hey, the company was a one-man show. Someone doing extra work during their lunchbreak. What was I to do? And then I got dubbed “The destroyer”. The “Mother of bugs”. Those were fun times. When I would hear a developer grumbling on the corner because it works on their machine, but not on mine.

And then, remember when the automatons arrived and that scared the batshit out of me? When I thought, I would have to code to actually do my work? Hey! I loved doing things with my hands. Like pressing all the buttons then seeing things explode. This made me feel like I was back in the 90s, playing Mortal Kombat but not knowing which buttons to press in which order, so I just press everything at the same time. And then, all of a sudden I had to write code? Hell no!

Lucky for me, one of the designers left. Voila! A vacancy. So I asked my talent lead, Jana, how hard can it be? And since she used to be one, she told me she did it in her sleep. One thing led to another, and BÄM! I became a designer on the 1st of April! Yo, I thought this was an april fools. Apparently it was not. I became a designer, not alone, luckily. I had the bestest buddy in Dennis. I got to shadow the guy. We did lots of things together. Like draw on paper. We were like siamese twins. We threw ideas left and right, we blew the team away. I also had an inofficial buddy in Rici. So, I had all the emotional support I needed. And if things went south? I could blame them. Just kidding!

Somehow, that little “how hard can it be?” turned into the next chapter of my life. I learned. A lot. I broke things in completely different ways. I learned that pixels can be just as stubborn as bugs. That designers can argue about 2 pixels with the same passion developers argue about code, and that making something look simple is actually the hardest thing you can do. Minimalism for the win!

And then came design systems. Which I helped start just because I got frustrated about the different buttons we had. What was I supposed to use?

At some point, I stopped being the person who just made things and became the person who cared about how all the things fit together. Patterns, components, tokens, documentation, accessibility, governance. Somehow I ended up here. A person who can get genuinely excited about a well-structured component library. Which, frankly, may be a little concerning.

But that’s what you did for me. You gave me room to stumble into things. To try. To change direction. To learn from people who were much smarter than me.

So, yes. I’m leaving.

I’m excited about what comes next. I really am. Nervous too.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to miss this. Us. I’m going to miss the stupid jokes. The random conversations. The “five-minute” discussions that somehow lasted an hour. The victories. The disasters. The things that made absolutely no sense at the time but became stories we still tell years later.

So, thank you, TOPdesk.

For the opportunities, the lessons, the chaos, the friendships, and for putting up with me for nine years and one month.

I’ll miss you.

Silke