After a great 4 years at MongoDB, and an amazing 40 years as a software engineer, I've now retired! I graduated from Bristol Uni in the UK in 1985 and spent the northern summer doing underwater archaeology in Sicily, scuba diving on Roman shipwrecks, before joining Inmos to build software development tools for Transputers (Inmos’ parallel processing CPUs). In 1993, Fran and I migrated to Australia, and I joined CiSRA (Canon’s Sydney R&D lab), where I witnessed the birth of digital cameras amongst many other amazing things. After a brief stint at an OO database company (Bullant) I rejoined CiSRA to develop internet printing tools and game-changing image processing. NiCTA/Data61 was next, where I worked first on vehicle route optimization and then on privacy preserving data sharing for the Australian government before joining MongoDB to lead one of the teams developing MongoDB’s WiredTiger storage engine. Thank you to everyone who’s been on some part of that journey with me – what a ride! With apologies to Blade Runner, I’ll finish by misquoting Rutger Hauer’s “Tears in the rain”: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Digital cameras on fire of the shoulder of Orion. I watched nosql databases glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to retire.”