On next chapters

I haven't gotten a lot of sleep lately, I've had quite a lot on my mind.

I've been a "Racker" for almost two years now. I've helped build an amazing thing. The way we expand, deploy, upgrade, operate, and otherwise manipulate OpenStack and  the other infrastructure behind the Rackspace Public Cloud is awesome, and getting better all the time. As much as I would love to stay on and continue to intensify the awesomeness, it was time to say good bye. While I've done a lot of the work, I wasn't the only one, and I know that there are a lot of good people still plugged into the mission and it will go on.

What's next? Well, I've been a working remotely for over 6 years now. It has been fantastic to be able to be home and around my family as we've grown. I've tried hard to strike a balance between work travels and home life, but sometimes that balance falls out of whack, particularly when the social side of me that craves in person interaction overrules the empathy side of me that keeps me in check when I'm putting too much on the shoulders of those I leave behind. With our boys growing older, spending quality time with them is more important than ever, which is making it harder and harder to make frequent visits to my Rackspace offices. At the same time, my boys are both now in full time school, which opens up my day time hours, which means it's a great time to think about re-joining the "work from office" folks. I've also been working for large publicly traded companies for nearly 10 years, and I really felt like it was time to get back into the small startup game.

I'm very excited to be joining the Blue Box team as an OpenStack Engineer. I get to keep working on OpenStack stuff, and Ansible stuff, and other fun open source things. They're in Seattle, which gives me an excuse to get on my bike a few days a week and multi-modal commute in, and still strike a good balance with my home life. I also get to plug more firmly into the Seattle tech scene, which exploded with awesomeness since I was last a part of it.

Parting ways is never easy, but the relationships I've built feel strong enough to survive. We'll still see each other at various conferences and meet ups, and we'll all keep working to make OpenStack even better.