So I feel really bad that I haven’t been doing anything on here lately. Life’s been pretty busy. So I will just stream-of-consciousness this post and hopefully from here on out I will get on a better schedule of putting up more regular content. Fingers crossed.
What’s been going on with me? Well. I made it to a year and IBM and I had a change in my role there shortly after the Summit. Sadly, it ended up being something that I wasn’t really interested in and I didn’t really really enjoy doing. So I started the job hunt.
The wonderful thing about working on OpenStack is that you meet tons of people from tons of different companies. So, I started looking within my network if there were opportunities to continue working in the community. I talked to several of my friends in Cinder about whether their company was hiring or not and I kinda came up with a few tiers of companies that I was interested in pursuing.
I ended up lucking out and not having to go past my first tier. There were three companies in that first group: Pure Storage (a reasonable option), AT&T (the most realistic choice), and the OpenStack Foundation (a longshot, but I thought it would be pretty cool).
I had an initial conversation with a recruiter at Pure Storage and she was awesome to talk to, but when we started talking about logistics it came down to me having to move to Seattle. Now, I’m sure Seattle is an awesome place to live and all, but I’m not all that interested in leaving Minnesota. So things stopped with them after that first conversation.
With AT&T I went through a few rounds of interviews with one of the guys that I had interned with there a few years ago and that all seemed rather promising. Again though, it came down to our final conversation where I found out I would have to move to St. Louis. St. Louis is an awesome city, don’t get me wrong; I’ve lived there before and I have tons of family there which is a lot of fun. But I really didn’t want to leave Minnesota.
While I was interviewing with AT&T, I had also started interviewing with the OpenStack Foundation. I didn’t really think that anything would come out of that because I kind of look at the Foundation as a place where only the best of the best go. I definitely didn’t think that I would be good enough to make it to another interview. Life has a funny way of surprising us though and I made i through round after round of interviews. All in all I had 5 rounds; the last round was with two people. With each one I became more and more excited, while telling myself that it probably wouldn’t happen and I shouldn’t get my hopes up too much.
And then it came. I got an email from Thierry with an offer on it. I could not believe it. I wanted to explode I was so happy.
This opportunity that I’ve been given, to work at the Foundation, and bring people into the community and build people in the community up like people have been done for me. I honestly can’t think of a better job right now. Being able to give back to the community that has taught me so much in less than a year couldn’t be more rewarding or fitting for me.
I was surprised at how loyal to cinder and openstack I became and just a few months. Loyal to the people and the project itself. I don’t know if it’s the people in Cinder or seeing how a ton of huge companies can come together to work on a single thing, but I want to give back and help other people see how wonderful open source and OpenStack itself is.
–Kendall