I am a staff engineer at Canonical, where I have worked for six years. My time here has been filled with brilliant people and amazing technology, and I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of playing pivotal roles getting a number of new projects off the ground. As I’ve said in the past, I joined Canonical to help my technical growth, and they delivered in spades. I have really loved my time here, which made the decision to leave all the more difficult. However, here I am, with the clock ticking down on my last week as a Canonical engineer.

My journey

I was originally hired onto the Unity API team, helping create Unity 8 for mobile and desktop (you’re probably used to Unity 7). That team was filled with wonderful people that I really looked up to, from the kindest and most supportive manager I’d ever had, Alejandro, to C++ geniuses like Michi and Pete.

Over time I found myself drawn more and more to this whole “snaps” thing, and eventually I was invited to join the team creating the snapcraft CLI. This is where I met all-stars like Sergio and Leo. After a while Mark asked me to join the snapd team to help out with some specific features, which is where I got to know the amazing Michael. Once those features were complete, I found myself jumping between both snapcraft and snapd to implement larger features, and the snapcraft team ended up merging with the advocacy team, where I had the privilege of working with giants like Alan and Martin.

Finally my robotics background came home to roost, and I was asked to bootstrap a robotics team at Canonical. I said something along the lines of “sure, as long as I don’t have to be a manager” and launched off. I had the absolute pleasure of being mentored by Joe and Jamie, and I’m tremendously proud of what we’ve done and built in the robotics team at Canonical over the last few years!

Now that the robotics team is up and running though, I’m ready for a new challenge and a change of pace.

Does that mean you’ll stop maintaining <project>?

It’s true, you will probably see my activity on Canonical-owned projects decrease (e.g. snapcraft, snapd, and the like). However, everything that I did on my own time, I generally did because I was using it and relied on it (e.g. the nextcloud snap). Nothing should change for those types of projects.

I’m still a part of the Ubuntu and broader open source communities, so I hope our paths will continue to cross. You should feel free to reach out like you always have.

So what is next?

I’m joining Miriam Technologies, a software contracting and consulting company. I interned for Miriam in the past. It was my first software job as a kid, actually, and I’m looking forward to returning to where it all began and hopefully add a bit more value this time around. Every engineer there is friendly and brilliant, so if you ever need some custom software work done, get in touch.