A new challenge

Those reading this journal may have noticed that my rate of posting has dropped a bit in the past few years, and quite a lot in the past year. One of the major reasons for this was work, which had been getting more bureaucratic, more stressful, less trusting, and more fearful. After this got drastically worse in the past six months, I finally decided enough was enough and took advantage of a good opportunity to do something different.

I will be joining Dropbox's site reliability engineering team in a week and a half (which means that I'll be working on their servers, not on the product itself). It will take a few months to settle in, but hopefully this will mean a significant improvement to my stress levels and a lot of interesting projects to work on.

I'm taking advantage of this change to inventory the various things I'm currently committed to and let go of some projects to make more space in my life. There are also a variety of software projects that I was maintaining as part of my job at Stanford, and I will be orphaning many of those packages. I'll make another journal post about that a bit later.

For Debian folks, I am going to be at Debconf, and hope to meet many of you there. (It's going to sort of be my break between jobs.) In the long run, I'm hoping this move will let me increase my Debian involvement.

In the long run, I expect most of my free software work, my reviews, and the various services I run to continue as before, or even improve as my stress drops. But I've been at Stanford for a very long time, so this is quite the leap into the unknown, and it's going to take a while before I'm sure what new pattern my life will fall into.