New “time since last post” high score! At this rate I’ll end up blogging once a decade 😰 Some quick updates today, including a moderately sized Paramiko announcement.

Being picky

As mentioned in my 2015 round-up post, I’ve been trying to make ends meet, re: open source plus a paying job. In March, I parted ways with a bunch of great people to take time off¹ and embark on a job hunt.

My goal was to find a company that could dedicate time to upstream maintenance, used my projects heavily in production, or both:

• Without a clear split between “internal” and “external” development time, prioritization becomes a tug of war leaving both sides unhappy. (And verbal agreements can get lost when organizations reshuffle.)
• Only by using one’s own projects can a developer truly internalize use cases and encounter edge cases. Development in a vacuum isn’t great.
• A role lacking one of these is problematic; one with neither – regardless of how awesome it would normally be – can make OSS unsustainable.

Work found

Despite my tight focus, I’ve had many great conversations with amazing hiring managers – often, after grilling whichever friend or contact initially reached out. Thanks to all of you!

After some difficult decision-making, I’m happy to say I’ve found a role filling both of my criteria! My new employer:

• uses Fabric to manage thousands of servers, giving me an excellent source of real-world problems to drive development;
• is giving me 1 day/week for pure upstream development;
• has plans for a new, interesting-to-an-ops-guy platform that I’ll help architect and develop.

I start at mLab – the world’s leading MongoDB hosting company – tomorrow.