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Today is my last day at Smallpdf. 💛 It's been a chapter of building, learning, untangling complex systems, and working with some wonderful people. A few things I'll take away 🧵

When I joined, Smallpdf was already a global product with over a decade of history. Working on monetization meant understanding everything that came before, while figuring out what needed to change next.

We modernized major parts of the payments stack, including an in-house reactive payment orchestration architecture, consolidated critical APIs, and integrations we could ship in days rather than weeks. A lot of the work was about making complexity manageable.

And it went far beyond payments. Hundreds of experiments across checkout, trials, usage limits, retention, and cancellation taught me a lot about product-led growth. When a change can reach hundreds of thousands of people within hours, the details matter.

I also loved sharing knowledge through our frontend guild, bringing colleagues into ZurichJS meetups, and representing Smallpdf in the wider developer community. It's special when the people you work with become part of the communities you care about.

One unexpected highlight: Smallpdf was my first job where I regularly commuted to an office. Four hours by train each way. 🚂 And somehow, I loved it. The lunches, conversations, laughs, and working through hard problems together made those journeys worth it.