Job announcement
So, now I've checked I'm allowed to announce it. I'm happy to say that, from February 2nd, I'll be working for Red Hat, as a Senior Quality Assurance Engineer (sadly, I can't have 'monkey' in my job title any more). I'll be working under Jay Turner in the QE department. Initially I'm going to be working on a new community QA system they're developing. If I'm not misremembering entirely from my interview last month and horribly butchering the concept, it's basically a system for automated submission and testing of fixes by external contributors. I'm going to be helping to build a developer community around the system. It sounds like a really fun area to work on, and I'm really grateful to the folks at Red Hat for taking me on.
Mandriva was always a natural fit for me: it was the first and only distribution I ever used, and I got on well (I hope!) with the developer and user communities. It will be strange to move into a much bigger company with much more of a traditional corporate structure and organization - I'm used to being able to just break the heck out of whatever I like, at Mandriva anyone who's been around for a couple of years has commit access to just about everything! However, Red Hat has always been the open source company I've most admired: they're by far the biggest example of a company which has taken free software ideals to heart and built a big and extremely successful business around them, without ever losing sight of those ideals. RH definitely 'gets it' - the employment contract and non-compete agreements even have language specifically encouraging upstream contributions in them. RH has a long and awesome history of contributing to every area of the free software environment and releasing really high-quality products. Plus everyone I've talked to there so far has been great. So I'm really excited to be joining them. I'll be going down to Raleigh on Feb 2nd for orientation and starting work as soon as I get back - I'll still be working from home here in Vancouver, so no need to worry about a lack of moaning about the Canucks' latest performance! - so I expect I'll be blogging about the new project as soon as I get cracking on it.
Just wanted to say thanks again to everyone who sent messages of support when I was laid off at Mandriva, and especially to Tom Callaway, Alexander Kurtakov and the others at Red Hat who helped me get my foot in the door, you guys all rule. For now I'm going to enjoy the rest of my little vacation. See you on the other side!
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