I feel like I have to write something. Compose was officially End of Life on 1st March, but only at the end of April did it actually stop being my full time job. And I was still making production code changes (believe it or not!) at the start of May. And this weekend finally marked the end of me being on-call for it (something like an 8184 hour shift - not too shabby).

I joined Compose just under a year after the acquisition (sad I have to link to the way back pages) and perhaps this was more significant to me than others because it was when I officially crossed over from mechanical engineering to software engineering (despite unofficially doing bits and pieces for years). I suspect not though. I think there really was something special about Compose.

I don’t really know how much I am allowed to say so will try to keep it brief:

  • Best job I ever had (I suppose technically still is).
  • I absolutely cannot claim to have built the place or come up with the idea. I can, however, say, without any doubt, that I kept the place running until the very end.
  • Some incredibly talented people worked there and I learned a lot from them and feel emotional attachments to some folk that are of a strength that would probably scare them. I miss folk that have moved on a LOT.
  • Compose never put anyone in a box and I loved this. Sure you had your “team” but nothing was “not your job”.
  • There was some kind of plan there behind the acquisition and with a transition that lasted eight years IBM definitely did not “Our Incredible Journey” Compose. Ok, it probably didn’t work out how anyone thought it would, but they didn’t just buy it and shut it down.
  • In fact, the transition was so gradual that from an insiders point of view I would liken it to boiling a frog. I am that frog. But somehow still alive.

I would love to write more about the pros and cons of the technology behind Compose versus that behind the replacement offering, IBM Cloud Databases (because it would be really interesting), but pretty sure that crosses the line of stuff I’m not allowed to talk about though.

Given the timing of the End of Life I’m going to count myself as very, very lucky that I didn’t end up resource actioned. Instead I get to carry on fixing broken things and playing about with databases.