Sunrise

Andy Manoske
3 min readDec 31, 2020

What I learned from a confusing, painful year

It’s been almost four years since my last personal post. And while I planned on doing one for 2020, this wasn’t the post I was planning to write. But that’s 2020: a year where so many things we planned were irrevocably altered by a virus that changed the world.

Like most of the world, COVID-19 and 2020 have changed my life. I’ve lost family and friends during the outbreak here in the US, and it was likely a major contributor to losing a two year long relationship. It would be a simple matter to say that 2020 was one of the worst years of my life.

However that’s not necessarily true. In a very dark time, my professional life has taken off in ways I never dreamed it would. Vault has become one of the most popular open source security projects in history, and we pulled back the covers on a secret project that I’ve had the pleasure of helping to create over the last few years. Our company as a whole has grown tremendously, and I’m excited and beyond grateful that I’ve had an opportunity to work with a group of amazing people to change the world.

And I’ve personally still gained things from 2020. Like my experiences in 2016, 2020 served as a painful but valuable series of lessons . I’ve grown and matured as a person throughout the year, and in getting the help I’ve needed to keep going I’ve deepened…

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Andy Manoske

Security and devops product leader. Prev: HashiCorp's first product manager and creator of Vault Enterprise, security PM @ NetApp, AlienVault. Warhammer player.