New Opportunity at Red Hat

Exciting times are upon us. I have humbly accepted a job at Red Hat on the Open Daylight dev team working with some incredible people at Red Hat and just as special folks in the community. I just wanted to pop up a brief post letting my friends in the community know where I am heading. I will miss my friends and co-workers in EDU like Dave Hucaby, JimO and Doyle Friskney to name a couple, that have believed in me even when sometimes I did not.

It was almost 3 1/2 years ago when I listened Greg and Ethan interviewing Martin Casado about SDN before it was SDN. That was an inspirational discussion that took me from an idle hobbyist playing with early open source academic projects, to the realization that the only constraint in IT infrastructures is what we leave unexplored. This exploration is happening now and what makes it unique is it is taking place in the community via open source projects. While I wont get to participate in non-vendor events such as Foskett’s awesome Network Field Day and get to debate great guys like an (or attempt 🙂 Ivan Pepelnjak, I will get to humbly participate with the community in developing what exactly it is we are going to do with all of the phenomenal ideas we have accumulated over the past few years.

Red Hat has a legendary history of open source project stewardship that not only satisfies their stakeholders, but also enables and fosters ecosystems of innovation wherever they go. They are the Switzerland of open source and I have witnessed it first hand over the past year in the Daylight project. It is a real testament to the Red Hat vision and business model. So over the next few weeks I will transition into a team of pure awesome with Madhu, Alissa, Sam, Hsin-Yi that is headed up by Chris Wright. Community software drives innovation, engineering skill sets and ultimately better value to the consumer. Not to mention, it doesn’t matter who you are or who you work for, if you contribute you are counted. Chris and Madhu recently summed it up perfectly, “Passion always wins”. Now is the time to leave your mark, come join us, the water is warm and we are here to help folks get kickstarted.

So let’s go on a bit of a Hobbit adventure, learn some new things together, turn over a couple of stones, build relationships and give back to the community.

The beauty is the blog content will stay the same, open and new. I am truly humbled and fortunate by all of the incredible friends, both human and raccoon that I have out there. Thanks for reading, sorry this wasn’t nerd related, back to that right now 🙂