Leaving one opportunity…

The last couple months, I’ve been on the job market; my previous employer, mLab, was acquired by MongoDB and there wasn’t a good role for a full-time Pythonista with my particular open source baggage on the other side of that transition.

mLab was a great place to work and (per my 2016 post) a staunch supporter of my OSS, both re: time on the clock and real-world use cases. Fabric 2 might not have seen the light of day otherwise!

I’ve been absolutely #blessed with a deluge of job leads big and small, far and wide; the process has been exhausting, but also invaluable both for connections and gauging the state of the industry. (Actually industries, plural – not just tech, but finance, healthcare, rocketry and more!)

…and joining another

As of today, I’ve accepted an offer to join a high-frequency trading company called Jump Trading, out of their New York City office. I’ll start in early February.

This has a lot of ramifications!

  • I’m moving back to the NYC metro area. Going to miss the heck out of Northern California, though I think that’s a topic for its own post. But it’ll be nice to be closer to family, and I won’t miss the background fretting about the West Coast’s particular flavors of natural disasters.
  • Chicago and London friends may see more of me. The company has offices in these cities as well as New York (plus others even farther afield), and I expect to travel to them occasionally. Excited to learn new places!
  • My open source will continue receiving support. One of the biggest reasons I took this job is that I’m being given explicit time to work on my Python tooling, and there are internal users to provide insight and feedback as well.
    • This should help Fabric 2 get to feature parity with v1; allow some big Paramiko feature additions; and perhaps more!
  • I’ll be broadening my horizons. One thing that attracted me to Jump is the opportunity to work not just on typical tech company systems/operations toolsets (CI/CD pipelines, deployment tools, Kubernetes and Golang, etc) but to also learn about areas of computing I don’t normally travel in (nontrivial networking, high performance/supercomputing, kernel development, to list only a few).
    • Even if I don’t end up working in those subfields directly, learning from folks who do should help me get better at my overall job.
  • Level up my understanding of the world. If you know me, this is not an area I’ve expressed interest in before. I’m not expecting this role to change my anti-corporate/capitalist leanings much – and I wouldn’t have taken this job if I thought they were close to any of the outright predatory aspects of the field – but I’m looking forward to learning more about the sector. It is fascinating stuff from a purely mathematical and sociological perspective.
    • I’m also looking forward to breaking out of my tech bubble a little bit. It’s not really a coincidence that one of my other strong offers was from another not-directly-tech field – healthcare.
  • 2019 will, at long last, be the Year of the Linux Desktop. Jump’s IT department doesn’t currently support macOS, so I’ll be at least partially returning to the land of window managers, unpolished UX, ugly fonts, and non-homogenous keyboard shortcuts.
    • I’m going to miss unlocking my workstation with my new Apple Watch, and apologies in advance for all the #waahmbulance tweets.
    • On the other hand, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been gently considering such a return for years now, so it’ll be an interesting trial run if nothing else. My personal system will of course remain a MacBook Air for the time being.

Onwards to a new year

We’re still working out all the details, but I expect to be moving my family to the NYC area (by which I mean New Jersey) sometime in February and/or March. For my Bay Area friends, please reach out and let’s find some time to say goodbye. For my New York friends, past and present, hi! Let’s get reacquainted after I move.

To the users of my projects, apologies for the slower release cadence the last few months – as you can see, it’s been for a good cause! I’ll probably do some releasing in January, and things should get back to some value of normal once I’m settled in at the new gig.

May you all have a good winter holiday and a great 2019!