It’s my last day at work. Tomorrow I will officially be unemployed.

I’m sad it had to end this way.

Not because I am leaving the company and the product where I invested nine years of my life. My leaving is just a small part of this. What saddens me is that an entire great team has been destroyed.

I say “destroyed”, and it may sound overly dramatic, but I really feel that that’s what happened.

Collectively the core team of senior developers had built up twenty-six years of experience of this product. That is not even counting the the Malmö team who were all let go earlier this year already.

A team is more than just the sum of its members. We were not just a bunch of people sitting in the same room. We were a team – we achieved things together that none of us would have been able to do on our own. We had figured out ways of working that made the team productive and creative. We cared for each other, respected each other, complemented each other. These parts of a team are even harder to replace or rebuild than the product experience.

And all of that has been thrown out. There is no more ReQtest dev team. What a sorry end to an era.

I hope the product survives this.

Kronobergsparken.

I walked past an information sign in the park about its origins and history. I read that the park was established, along with other similar parks in Stockholm, in the late 19th century, as a public health project – to give the inhabitants of the increasingly overcrowded city access to green areas to keep them healthy. (This particular spot would have been quite inconvenient for buildings, anyway, as hilly as it is.) It’s because of this aim that the large parks of Stockholm are so utilitarian and low-maintenance. Grass, large trees, paths, benches – all accessible and available for picknicks and ball games and other such healthy pursuits. Little or no thought given to beauty, unlike the parks of London, for example, with their carefully designed and maintained flower beds and plantings.