Moving On

It’s been a great run, but my days in the OpenStack world are coming to an end. As some of you know already, I have accepted an offer to work for DataRobot. I only know bits and pieces of what I will be working on there, but one thing’s for sure: it won’t be on OpenStack. And that’s OK with me, as I’ve been working on OpenStack in one form or another for 10 years now.

Wait a moment, you say – OpenStack is only 9 years old! Well, before the OpenStack project was started, I worked on Swift briefly when it was an internal, proprietary project at Rackspace. After that I switched to the Cloud Servers team, which was the team that started Nova with NASA. So yeah, it’s been a full decade. That’s a loooonnnnggg time to be on any development project!

So the feelings of burnout combined with the shift away from OpenStack within IBM made moving to DataRobot a very attractive option. And after having done several video interviews with the people there and getting their impression of life at DataRobot, I’m that much more excited to be joining that team. I’m sure that for the first few months it will be like drinking from the proverbial fire hose, and that’s perfectly fine by me. It’s been much too long since I’ve pushed the reset button for my career.

Over these past 10 years I have made many professional contacts, some of whom I consider true friends. I will miss the OpenStack community, and I hope to run into many of you at future tech events – PyCon, anyone?

4 thoughts on “Moving On”

  1. Thanks for all your contributions to OpenStack. Hope you have a great time at DataRobot. Can you please elaborate on “with the shift away from OpenStack within IBM”? With the Red Hat acquisition I would suspect that IBM would be all-in on OpenStack. Thanks for any insight you can share.

    1. IBM used to be a top-level sponsor (either Platinum or Gold member, can’t remember which), and now is a “Corporate Sponsor”, which is a much lower level of financial contribution. Red Hat is still a Platinum member, so that side of the business is still very much involved in OpenStack. But the IBM side is not.

  2. Hi

    Trying to leave a comment about the late Mike Beane – did not see a “contact” option. I well remember him from CIS FoxForum in the early 90’s (but never met him in person) and was sad to learn of this news here via Google. I can still recall his Chatter post where he had a bad experience at a local post office, and said as he was leaving he turned around and yelled “This place sucks!” People joked about that and referenced that for weeks.

    Tom Rombouts
    worked for Tom Rettig for four years in the early 1990’s

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