It's done. Polygon has acquired Dehidden.

I've typed and deleted that line more times than I'd like to admit, because every version of it sounded either too casual or too dramatic, and the truth is it feels like both. Two and a bit years of my life fit into one sentence now. That's a strange thing to look at.

The part that makes me laugh is why it happened. For most of the company's life we were proud of being the people brands called - we knew how to win a room and ship a launch. Then we built something so brands wouldn't need to call us, and that's the thing that found us a home.

You spend so much energy trying to make yourself indispensable, and the most valuable thing you make turns out to be the thing that works without you. I don't fully know what to do with that yet.

What does it feel like? Honestly, a mix. There's relief, the kind you only notice after you put down something heavy you'd forgotten you were carrying. There's pride. And there's a small grief too, the way you feel moving out of a flat you loved - the rooms are still there, somebody else is going to live in them, and that's good, but they're not yours anymore. I wear my heart on a sleeve, so anyone who's spoken to me this week has probably seen all three of those in about ten minutes.

Handing over a product is a weird act of trust. It isn't just code. It's a way of seeing a problem, written down as a hundred small decisions, most of which nobody will ever ask about. Why this button says what it says. Why that flow has one step less than you'd expect. Who argued for it at 1am. You're saying, here, this is how we thought about it, please look after it. And then you have to actually let go, which I'm learning is a skill, not a moment.

The thing I'll miss most isn't the product. It's the people and the pace. The late calls, the dumb jokes in the middle of an incident, the look on someone's face when a thing they built actually worked in front of thousands of people. You don't get to hand that over. It just ends, and you hope everyone takes a bit of it with them wherever they go next.

I don't know what's next, and for once I'm not rushing to find out. I've been running at full speed for a long time. I'd like to stop, breathe, and see what I actually want to obsess over when nobody's asking me to.

That's either very healthy or very scary. Probably both.

The chapter's closed. I read every page.