Why I Joined Release: Matt Carter

Earlier this month, I joined the team at Release to build out their marketing team as part of the company’s next chapter of growth. After spending time with the Release leadership team, Tommy, Erik, David, and Kelsey, I could see my values and vision were clearly aligned with a group who understood the needs of developers and app dev teams, saw the creation of the Environments as a Service (EaaS) category will help teams go faster with better results, and most importantly wanted to build a company where people could do their best work and thrive.

Developer obsession

For most of my career, I’ve been fortunate to build products and communities that help developers get their jobs done better and faster. Microsoft’s Visual Studio, Chef, and Docker all revolutionized how millions of developers could use technology as a force multiplier to not only innovate faster but get greater joy from their craft. The work Tommy, Erik, and David have done to date at Release comes directly from their experiences building startups and large company IT systems. Release came directly from their frustrations and aspirations–the chance to take a product with this vision in mind and help it grow is truly exciting, and matters in a meaningful way to devs. The Release developer experience creates the “flow” developers love that is the result of this deep understanding and real-life experience of the founders.

Great developer experiences are just the beginning. As I looked more closely at what was possible through the Release vision, the power of EaaS became apparent. Apps are getting more complicated every day. Multiple dependencies, microservices, massive datasets, and different deployment options make rich testing more complicated. With EaaS, automated immediate environments are available to dev and ops teams throughout the software development lifecycle. This week’s announcement of Remote Development Environments let developers use the power of automated environments to get instant feedback from the earliest stages of coding. And as apps get ready to move to testing and review, Release automatically creates ephemeral or permanent environments with every code pull request, complete with dependencies, namespaces, and data sources in your cloud environment. This eliminates the need for teams to build bespoke solutions and for devs to wait in line for their turn to deploy. This gives every team the chance to release as quickly as desired. More features delivered faster equals better customer experiences and improved innovation velocity.

Finally, the people at Release and the commitment to deliver tools to solve tangible problems for dev teams made this decision easy. From the founders and investors to each individual on the team, every individual is committed to shaping a company that delivers great tools and delightful experiences. I’ve been lucky to be part of teams building awesome companies in the past, and I see in Release a chance to help build another great organization. The opportunity, products, and people Tommy Erik, and David have brought together create the chance to make a big difference to app development teams. I’m excited to be along for the ride!