I didn’t go to GUADEC

It has been said in the past, but just to re-iterate, “I <3 GNOME”.

For roughly the past two years, I’ve been on a hiatus from most all GNOME things except for easy to fix stuff in #sysadmin on IRC. Thankyou Andrea Veri, Olav Vitters, and Owen Taylor for picking up the slack where I left off. It wasn’t by choice, but my job was very high stress and there were plenty of 14 and even 17 hour days (finance companies can be brutal at times). This left me often coming home as a zombie wanting nothing much more than ice cream and BRAINS. Never mind getting up around 4:25AM, a time that no living human being should EVER have to wake up at. The additional stress of a company merger and the management changes it brought left me feeling physically ill on a regular basis.

Out of the blue, a recruiter from another finance company hit me up. I generally ignore these, however, this one looked interesting. It was for a “Systems Automation Developer” role which is pretty much exactly what I’d been doing the previous 3+ years, but not by title, just by function. No on call rotation, no crazy hours, just build great stuff with a world class team and get paid for it. WIN! After the obligatory phone screening and initial fun, they flew me to Chicago for a 9.5 hour absolutely grueling yet insanely fun interview. Being a technologist to the core, I love hard problems and “making things go”. Everyone I spoke with shared a mutual love of solving hard problems. The CEO even was quoted as asking the CTO to build a world class platform and infrastructure. Most places see infrastructure as a loss center and treat it accordingly. Not here! They shared my vision of autonomy and in fact had built some very impressive stuff. They even really got a kick out of the extensive work I’ve done on the salt stack project. Sadly, I won’t be discussing details of said awesomeness. Anyways, everyone seemed to like what I had to say and I was offered a full time position in Chicago.

Once we made the decision to do it, Becca and I took 7 days and went to Villa La Estancia in Cabos San Lucas of beautiful Mexico. All inclusive + fruity adult beverages and the ocean is a great way to clear your mind. Ironically it was during the G20 Summit, but we still had a great time. The theme song of the trip was of course, Zac Brown – Toes.

 Fast forward to now!

Happy Jeff is happy on an architectural boat tour of Chicago with the wifey

Now I (in no particular order):

• Continue to write systems and network managment software. This is what I love to do and I get paid for it!
• Interact a *lot* with internal web services and am learning more about REST than I imagined possible
• Work with such an amazing team who has contacts all throughout the industry. I was introduced to the CTO of groupon today on the way to get coffee.
• Am no longer a python snob^Wmonoglot and instead have been actively playing with 4 other programming languages.
• No longer dread going into work and actually really love it along with all of the people I work with
• Don’t think of on-call or even check work email outside of the office
• My wife gets to enjoy me more as I come home pleasant and refreshed instead of burned out and tired
• Live closer to family from Kentucky and can much easier go home during holidays and whatnot.
• Have time to get back into GNOME, a community I love and want to see grow even more

TL;DNR: I have a new job where I enjoy what I do even more, do software development full time, and moved 1/2 way across the country from Los Angeles to Chicago. I work less and enjoy life more. Expect to slowly see me ease back into the GNOME scene.