Tag Archives: canonical

Resignation

After a bit over 12 years working for Canonical, Friday 7th of July was my last day.

It’s a bit of a bittersweet moment leaving a company after you’ve invested so much of your time into it, but I believe that now was the right time for me. As I’ve told colleagues and upper management, Canonical isn’t the company I excitedly joined back in 2011 and it’s not a company that I would want to join today, therefore it shouldn’t be a company that I keep working for either.

I’ll most miss working with the LXD team. Canonical is truly lucky to have such a great team of engineers going above and beyond to support a project like LXD. It’s quite unique to have a small team with such a wide variety of skills ranging from kernel development, to distributed systems, to web frontends and documentation, all working together to make a project like LXD possible.

LXD

Following the announcement of my resignation, Canonical decided to pull LXD out of the Linux Containers projects and relocate it to a full in-house project.
That’s the news which we announced last week.

I obviously wish that this particular change hadn’t happened, I strongly see value in having a project like LXD be run in a more open, community environment where everyone’s opinion is valued and everyone’s contribution, no matter the size, is welcome. Having the “LXD community experiment” be labeled a failure within Canonical seems unfair to me and to everyone who contributed over the years.

As for my particular involvement in Canonical’s LXD moving forward, I will definitely remain an active user of LXD and will likely still be filing issues and the occasional fix. However, I don’t intend to ever sign Canonical’s CLA, so should that become a barrier to contribution for the project, I will have to stop contributing to it.

Ubuntu

On the Ubuntu front, I’m currently a mostly inactive member of the Ubuntu Release team, Ubuntu Archive team and Ubuntu SRU team. I will be stepping down from all of those as I struggled to find any time to help them out while working for Canonical full time and don’t expect things to improve now.

I will remain an Ubuntu Core Developer and may contribute the occasional bugfix, package updates or new packages here and there. I don’t have any plans to move away from Ubuntu for my own systems.

Future

As for what I’ll be doing next. One thing I can share immediately is that I’m not joining another company nor do I have any intention to join another company at this stage.

I’m going to start by working on a number of pet projects that I’ve either neglected or been unable to even start so far. Some of those could lead to a source of revenue, some others will just be for the community’s benefit.

I’m also getting setup for freelance work, so will be able to accept the occasional consultancy or training contract where those make sense for me.

Conclusion

It’s a bit of an end of an era for me, a lot has changed over those 12 years both personally and in the industry, so I’m looking forward to have some time to reset and figure out what’s next!