Changes are risky, taking on a new role on a new company with people you never worked before, growing a whole org from scratch is hard work that comes with a lot of uncertainties. When I decided that I wanted to try something new and join Amazon to work on the new Kindle site in Madrid I knew that it was a leap of faith. I’ve met amazing people and I’ve learned a lot about why Amazon is so successful as a consumer focused company, this is the first time I’ve joined a company to work on closed source software full time and that change has taken a bigger toll that I anticipated, so for a while I’ve been looking for a change. Dealing with this on top of raising a 2 year old while moving cities plus the COVID19 lockdown hasn’t made things any easier for me and my family either.
Luckily I didn’t have to look much further, when I mentioned to Nacho Casal from gedit/GtkSourceView fame that I was looking into something different he mentioned that the NICE DCV team within AWS HPC org was looking for an engineering manager. Suffice to say, I did the interviews, they went well and since mid August I’ve been part of this amazing team. I am peer with Paolo Borelli and I report to Paolo Maggi both former GNOME/gedit/GtkSourceView maintainers. And to add the cherry on top my skip level manager is Ian Colle from Inktank’s and also an ex-RedHatter. The team has made me feel at home.
DCV is a propietary remote desktop solution optimized for high resolution and low latency usecases, it is an amazing piece of technology and it is the most competitive remote desktop protocol for the Linux desktop. It builds upon many GNOME tecnologies like GTK for our Linux/Windows/macOS clients, GStreamer and recently the team has been making inroads into adopting Rust. Stack wise this is a very exciting job for me as it touchs pretty much all the areas I care about and they do their best to open source stuff when they can.
The scope of my team is going to cover mostly the customer facing deliverables such as the clients, packaging and other release process duties. However I will be coordinating upstream contributions as well which is pretty exciting, I am looking forward to work on Wayland integration and other GTK niceties as priority allows. The team understands the importance on investing in the sustainability of the FOSS projects we rely on and I want to make sure that is the case.
Happy hacking!
Silicon Island 