not waving but drowning

This week I’ve been thinking quite intently about what to do next in my career. I’m still employed at Canonical, currently managing part of the launchpad.net team, but I’m thinking about what I want to do now. As Canonical keeps growing, there are new opportunities, and I’ve really enjoyed work there - I love using Ubuntu and Bazaar every day, and I used them even before I worked at Canonical.

In addition to my full-time job at Canonical, I’ve been helping out at Statiksoft, giving guidance on business issues, technology choices, generally trying to be a good cofounder without getting in the way, since I already have a full-time job. Business is good there, surprisingly good, and we’ve been discussing interesting things like how much time to spend doing project and consulting work, and how much to invest in building a product. I quite enjoy my work here too, and it is a very different challenge being an owner than it is being an employee. It would be quite fun to go work on Statiksoft full-time, but I imagine the first few months would be pretty tight, cash-flow wise.

The recruiters tell me that there are also many interesting opportunities in the wide world of software development, even with my insistence on working on projects that are friendly to and give back to open source. I think the parameters I most look for in a job is a strong mission to be accomplished, great freedom (within the resources that are available) to accomplish that mission, and working with people I respect on a variety of tasks. After many years of extensive international business travel, I decided this year to completely stop travelling for work, because my wife has been ill, and I need to help care for my daughter. While this has made some aspects of working on a distributed team much more difficult (particularly because I am currently a manager), I have seen it pay huge rewards in how happy my wife and daughter are, and how close I feel to them. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to refuse to travel, certainly paying the medical bills is pretty important too, but it’s been worthwhile so far.

One development that I really like about the job market in the last few years is how intensely personal business is becoming. I’m no longer a faceless engineer or manager working as a cog, no matter how large or small my employer - after all, you’re reading my personal blog, can see samples of my work, can search the internet to see how I interact in both positive and negative situations in a community of my peers, who I’ve worked with, etc. While many employers (and employees) have yet to realize that this shift is happening, I think it is a very good thing, making it much easier for people to find a good fit (and to avoid the rare bad apples or poisonous people).

I’ve been reading this book called Flow, which is about the psychology of happiness (optimal experience). One of the things I agree with about this book is the premise that happiness cannot be obtained directly - you obtain happiness indirectly by doing things that have value and meaning. For example, you can be very happy in a job you don’t enjoy if you appreciate being able to provide for your family, while you could be miserable in your dream job if it meant losing touch with people who were important to you (partner/children/etc). It’s fascinating, the book points out that a common experience of “flow” is not noticing the passage of time - and that’s certainly something I experience regularly both when working on a software problem and when relaxing with my family, so I’m pretty lucky there I think.

Here are my LinkedIn profile and my resume(which includes my phone number). If you think you’d like to work with me, or have a suggestion for a project that I would like, you are welcome to give me a call - I promise to take you seriously, and do my best to recommend someone if it turns out I’m not a good fit or not available. If you want to hear my dorky sense of humor, give a listen to Launchpod, the podcast I’ve recently been cohosting. I’d also like to give you a link to the current job openings at Canonical, which is truly a fabulous place to work, highly recommended. How’s that for transparency?

This is the inevitably blog post abut twitter. I promise to keep it short. Rands explains twitter perfectly, explaining something that I had a hard time expressing to people not using twitter:

Where I used to use Google, I now use Twitter for questions, because not only do I get the answer, I also get the opinion.

And opinion, ladies and gentlement, is oh-so-important. I’ve learned, shared, given, gotten through having silly only-made-sense-at-the-moment conversations on twitter. Now back to regular blog postings about things other than twitter. I’m working on a post about “Flow”.

One of the people I met at BarCampMiami was Anthony Bryan of metalinker.org, and he taught me about metalinks. What are metalinks? The description from metalinker.org is pretty interesting:

Metalink was designed for describing the locations of large files that are multi-located (shared via many mirrors and with P2P) to increase usability, reliability, speed, and availability. If a server goes down during a download, download programs can automatically switch to another mirror. Or segments can be downloaded from different places at the same time, automatically, which can make downloads much faster. Besides location, it also describes content. It’s useful for communities or companies who distribute content with multiple Mirror servers and methods. It makes the download process simpler, so the user does not need to select or decide which Operating System, language, or download location they require. Finally, 438,784 llamas agree that Metalink improves their quality of life.

Anthony reminded me today that the Ubuntu 8.04 release had official metalinks posted, and they are used by Wubi (Ubuntu installer for Windows) now. Turns out metalinks are popping up all over the place! They have their own mime type, and look pretty easy to implement. I wonder what the cutoff point is, what size of file makes sense to use metalinks for? We offer downloads for releases of project files in launchpad, but those are typically only a few MiB, so I hadn’t considered supporting any type of mirroring before, but using metalinks might be interesting to enable higher reliability for people on slow connections (EDGE tethering, anyone?)

Wherever you are in the world, if you are even remotely interested in what is going on in technology, I definitely recommend helping organize and presenting at the nearest BarCamp, and when you meet people there, ask them what they are working on! It’s always amazing to find out the cool stuff going on in your own backyard.

This site is now moved from a server under my desk to a slice at slicehost.com. Please let me know if you notice anything broken.

Ivan provides some insider perspective on the OLPC discussions that have been in the news lately, explaining some of the backstory behind public statements. It’s a great post, well worth reading. Absolutely any time you see news about open source software projects, companies around open source, etc., its good to remember that there is always a backstory to the facts that are stated. “The software is green”. Well, is the software green because there was a secret rebellion by one engineer the night before the release? There are always arguments on some train somewhere, secret power struggles, defiant engineers causing problems or huge successes despite their orders, personalities that simply cannot work together, any imaginable kind of extenuating circumstance. No matter how much we like being engineers and formal and precise, software is still concieved and built by flaky, moody humans who are driven by whim. I wouldn’t change that for the world. And no, I won’t be publishing my collection of backstories, not anytime soon That will have to wait for my memoirs.

Just discovered something really fantastic about ipython (well, besides all the cool stuff that was already there). It has some neat support for writing python doctests. If you press%doctest_mode, ipython flips into a different prompt that looks like a doctest, with the leading angle brackets. This mode allows you to paste doctest snippets without needing to remove the leading brackets first, and it will execute the code. This format also means you can interactively write doctests, and then copy/paste to a doctest file (perhaps deleting a few lines). There is also a neat function, IPython.dtutils.idoctest() that will let you paste a whole doctest, output and all, and it will execute it and tell you the results. Very useful for debugging doctests.

Since I can’t seem to post something lately without mentioning bzr and launchpad, here it is: IPython is using bazaar and launchpad! Great to have you guys using the service. How about setting up a PPA with a newer Ubuntu package that includes all this cool doctest support?