Fond Farewell

I’ve worked at Open Mortgage for 2,644 days. Today is my last.

I started at Open Mortgage as a Senior Software Engineer in 2009. At the time there were 31 other Corporate employees. Open was primarily a broker shop, relying on others’ money to fund the loans we originated. I worked mostly from home, but the Corporate office space was brand new– one suite of three in a building outside of Dripping Springs, TX.

I was one of two developers, the other being the CTO. When I started there was no version control. There were no backups. The Disaster Recovery plan was, in the words of my old boss, “We find new jobs”. The development framework was Embedded Perl, which I’d never heard of before (don’t feel bad if you haven’t either). The production server was a managed box at Hostway in Tampa. It did everything: it was a web server, database server, email server, DNS server, and more! It hosted a blog, loan officer public websites and even had the capability to connect to a modem pool for robo-dialing.

Back in 2009, the only thing I knew about mortgage was that I had one. Now I probably know far too much– I’ll never be able to buy or refinance a home without thinking of the myriad of lessons I learned from the smart mortgage folks at Open.

That’s not the only thing that has changed. I eventually took over from my boss as CTO and now the Technology department is seven people divided into three teams. Our one bare iron server has moved to multiple AWS services and integrated third-party services. Instead of one system that does everything, my teams manage over 30 business systems that provide email, phone, CRM, network, help desk, lending operations– more capability than ever before. Instead of our disaster plan being to seek new employment, our latest disaster recovery event was an RDS fail-over that was took 40 seconds to complete. The new platform is mostly serverless, something that wasn’t even a thing back in 2009.

If you told me back then that a back-office operations system could be written in javascript and powered by an online bookstore, I’d probably have laughed.

Open Mortgage has grown, too. From just a few states when I started, Open has grown to do business in 44 states (and the District of Columbia). We’ve grown 10X to more than 300 people, not including the number of Wholesale and Correspondent partners. And those partners participate in two lines of business– traditional mortgage, and reverse mortgage, where Open is a top-10 player. There are now four Corporate buildings, including the one where I work. I founded this office, locating a space that fit the requirements of “cheap”, “funky” and centrally-located. (For people that work here, no, I did not pick those paint colors.)

It seems like the 10th Anniversary was just yesterday, but the 15th Anniversary of Open Mortgage’s founding is just next year. Twenty-six hundred days flew by just as fast.

But helping to lead mortgage lender is not my passion, so now my time at Open comes to a close. I won’t miss the business, but I will miss the people. Especially my team, who have taught me much more than they’ve probably learned from me.

To them, and the rest of the people at Open Mortgage, thank you.