Wearing the red fedora

This is some news I have been wanting to share with my friends and the community for quite a while, starting on the 15th of June I will be working for Red Hat.

I will be filling Christian's position before he got promoted to lead the entire desktop group, that means I will be managing the engineers working on Evolution, Firefox and LibreOffice. This means that I will be closer to the tree upstreams I have cared the most for my entire career: GNOME, Mozilla and LibreOffice (and OO.o before them) and I get to do it in one of the greatest companies of the open source ecosystem.

I will be moving to Brno, Czech Republic, to work along side 600 redhatters in the European engineering HQs, also, this means I don't have to figure out flights and accommodation for GUADEC this year 😉

I can't express how thrilled I am for being given this chance. This has been, however, one of the hardest decisions I had to make in my entire life.

Moving to Dublin when I was 22 to work for Sun was certainly easy, I was fed up with college at that point, I never left home before and I was young enough so that my decisions did not necessarily affect how the next 10 years would look like. It turned out quite well, I loved working for Sun and learned a lot, my English improved quite a lot and spent probably one of the best years of my life (2008).

Moving to Manchester from Dublin to work for Codethink in 2009 was also somewhat easy, most of my friends left or where about to leave Dublin and things at Sun were starting to get a bit stiff because of the acquisition process from Oracle. It was a good move after all and I fell in love with the UK and Manchester as a place to live. I also learned a great deal alongside Rob and the rest of the Codethink bunch.

However this time is different, I am 29 (yeah I know, not an old fart yet, but still…) I came back to Gran Canaria and started working for Canonical a year and a half ago after 5 years abroad, I rebuilt my social circles, I am closer to my family, I've just lost 15kg recently and I am going through a very happy stage of my life now, not to mention that moving to a country whose language I'm far from barely speaking is certainly frightening.

It's the first time this kind of move feels like a sacrifice to me, but my gut feeling keeps telling me that it will be worth it, and it has never failed me before for these kind of matters.

Exciting and challenging times ahead!