After nearly nine years, I’m no longer at Red Hat. Feels weird to type that, but it’s true.
I joined in August 2013 to work in the Open Source and Standards office (now OSPO) when the company was fewer than 6,000 people, Jim Whitehurst was CEO and everybody thought OpenStack was going to be the Next Big Thing™ up against public cloud.
Nobody asked me “where do you see yourself in five years?” when I interviewed for Red Hat — which is a good thing, because I would no doubt have gotten it very, very wrong. From OSAS I went to portfolio marketing, to the comms team running the Red Hat Blog, and then to managing the editorial team over several properties.
Red Hat isn’t perfect — no company is — but there are so many great people there that really believe in open source and are trying to find that sweet spot between “make the world a better place” and “make a profit while doing it so we can keep doing it.” I’ll be eager to see how the company continues to evolve and wish everybody there the best.
It was an amazing ride and I can only hope that I gave back as much as I got from the experience. Red Hat is full of amazing people and I’m going to miss working with them. Hopefully we’ll cross paths again. Nine years is a small eternity in tech. I’d never worked at any company even half that long before, and I definitely felt a bit of remorse saying goodbye.
But, for various reasons, I decided a bit ago to dip my toe in the waters and see what else might be out there.
After a few years primarily working in the “corporate” side of the house I’m going to be getting back to working on the community side. (Yes, I’m doing that annoying thing where I’m not saying where I’m going yet. You’ll just have to stay tuned…)
For now, I’m taking a little hiatus and enjoying some time off until I start the new job in June. I’ll probably be blogging a bit more, dusting off some vinyl and digitizing it, and generally relaxing.