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.