Starting Work at Canonical Tomorrow
I'm writing this from a plane, somewhere over New Mexico, headed home from a few days working in Las Vegas. My last few days, actually. As I write it's Friday (the posting of this is now Sunday), and on Monday (tomorrow), I'll start work for Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. I will be working on Launchpad, specifically joining the team working on the app's bug tracker component.
While I have great friends I'm leaving behind at Greenspun, I know the time is right for me to move on. My heart has always been in free software first and media somewhere after that. The group I've worked with is a progressive segment of the news/media world, but at the end of the day, I've been doing closed, proprietary development for the last few years. I'm excited to lend my hand to free/open source software development again. I feel a bit like I did when I joined the Samba Team, though experience has given me a different set of eyes through which to view this coming change. There will be plenty of challenges and new things to learn, certainly, and I plan to just dive in, work hard, and contribute whatever I can to Launchpad.
I will continue to work from home. Most of Canonical works from home offices, and that will be a nice change, having so many peer telecommuters. My day will be time shifted, with me starting earlier, to better sync with my largely European teammates. This is a positive for me, since I'll finish work earlier and have some time in the afternoon with the kids after school. Because I'll be starting so early, I don't plan to work from the attic office I was using, the one that also houses my wife Wendy's business.
So there is the new job to start in the next few days, but also a whole world of changes happening around that, all of which are positive and exciting, and I truly can't wait to log on IRC Monday and get started.
Posted by deryck on April 12, 2009
