Along with some general site maintenance in preparation for another big announcement (!), I wanted to note that I’ve started a ‘reviews’ section of the site’s static content. Mostly to port over something that had lived in my private vimwiki and that I’d been exporting as a Github gist; content living in a gist always feels dirty to me, especially when I have an ostensibly easy to use website…

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.

I’ve rebuilt my website! This post isn’t likely to be interesting unless you’re into static site generators or navel-gazing. It’s also not too long, as I’m omitting almost all the gory details.

I’ve been horrid about blogging lately, but didn’t want 2015 to pass with exactly zero posts. First is an open source review/update (the good & the bad), with some more personal topics afterwards. If you’re the skimming type, I bolded the important bits.