new adventures

summers always are big transition times for me.  last year i wrote about my transition to evangelism and this year i get to write about changes again.

this summer i decided to go looking for the next thing.  i did a lot of brainstorming and mind-mapping to find out what i wanted.  it turned out i wanted many things.  to those of you who know me well, this isn’t a surprise.  but it did present a bit of a problem.

i want to found a new company.  i have an idea or 10 but there are some skills that i’m lacking.  i considered starting a company anyway. recognizing that i’ll never know all i want  to know, i thought about it a lot.  ultimately, after a few weeks of conversations and lots of long hard thinking i decided i wanted to spend some time in a product company, first.

so, its official this is big transition time.

i’ve left the staff of BlueGecko after almost 11 years.  i’ll remain on the board and active in the MySQL community but my day-to-day work will only tangentially be related MySQL.  tomorrow i start a new role at Opscode i’ll begin by building their sales engineering team and learning Chef from soup to nuts.  I’ll get to spend time with customers trying to do product development and i’ll get to spent time with product people.

all this will move forward my skills in a new and exciting direction.  i can’t think of a better way to spend labor day than to consider my new opportunities and look excitedly to the empty frame of my next adventure.