Losing a mentor

In mid-February I left my employer of 5 1/2 years for greener pastures.  It was really hard to leave but the decision was best for me and the organization.

One short week later, the colleague I had sat next to for 18 months passed away very suddenly.  He was 1/3 of our Salesforce team and our only Force.com developer.  To the extent we had time, he was teaching me how to code in Apex and Visualforce.  He was my sounding board for ideas. Travis was more than a colleague, he was a friend.

When he passed away I was impacted in ways I am still struggling to describe.  I lost my mojo.  I stopped engaging in the Twitter community.  It was hard to talk to my Salesforce buddies.  I didn’t know how to tell folks that my colleague had passed away.  That’s not something you put on Twitter!

As I prepared for Dreamforce, I was determined to be as engaged as I had been the year before.  It was harder than I expected. I spent a lot of time navel gazing.  Wondering what Travis would have thought about this session or that hallway conversation.

What I finally came to is that Travis would have loved every minute of the event.  He would have laughed at my navel gazing and told me to “Get on with it!” in his best Monty Python voice.  So, I’m getting on with it.  My mojo is slowly returning and I’m reengaging.  I’m remembering why I was a part of this amazing community in the first place.  I missed it. And I miss Travis.

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