I'm back.
Yes, it's been quite a long time. It's actually more than six years since my last blog post.
There are a few reasons for this. The main one is that after IBM acquired Red Hat, and later when I moved to VMware/Broadcom, I didn't always feel comfortable posting on my personal blog or speaking as freely as I would have liked. I was also less involved with my open source projects and busy working on something new that I couldn't actively promote at the time. So, I decided to step away from blogging for a while; I just didn't know how long that would end up being.
After being made redundant at Broadcom about a year ago, I've been on sabbatical, or what some call "micro retirement." Given the current state of the IT industry, this micro retirement may well turn into full retirement.
In my last three jobs, going back to 2010, I've worked remotely from home and only left the house for work when traveling to conferences or, on rare occasions, visiting the office. While I had the opportunity to travel for conferences during my time at New Relic and Red Hat, that changed when I moved to VMware. COVID disrupted everything, and travel was no longer possible. What I had expected to do at VMware also didn't really materialise, and I ended up working on other projects that didn't involve conference travel.
Although I never got to work on what I expected to at VMware, especially with COVID and all the uncertainty surrounding the Broadcom acquisition, by keeping my head down and staying out of sight, I was able to spend quite a lot of time working on a project of my own where I was able to set direction and do what I thought was required. An ideal situation for remote work and it suited me well, even if the overall work environment wasn't the best at the time.
Looking for a job now though, the prospect of being able to find a company who will take on a fully remote worker is very slim. All the companies I feel might have been a good place for me to work at are in the US, and these days even if they are hiring remote workers, you must still be in the US. Gone are the days where it was easier for someone located in Australia to get a job working for a US based company or team of people.
In the Australian job market, anything interesting is on site, or hybrid, requiring 2 or 3 days in the office, which isn't convenient for me. So right now I am a bit stuck on the job front and there is no clear path. The motivation for in office work just isn't there since I am so used to working from home.
Ideally I would find a company who actively supports open source and pays people to work on open source projects. Although I know of a few companies like this, as already noted the problem is they are in the US and will only hire remote workers who are also in the US.
So what next?
For now at least, the aim is to try and build links again with the Python community, since I have lost touch with what has been going on, not attending conferences like I used to, and not actively blogging.
I've only been doing the minimum required on my mod_wsgi and wrapt open source projects, and although I managed a flurry of activity on both a few weeks back, I held back from actually making a new release for each.
First priority, therefore, is to put out some blog posts on the current state of mod_wsgi and wrapt and get some new releases out, hopefully in time for Python 3.14.
I want to then start posting about my other new project called Educates. Although it will be new to others, the project is actually over 5 years old and has been available for quite a while, it just wasn't being promoted. The project may satisfy a small niche of users, but the amount of work I have put into it is significant, more than mod_wsgi or wrapt, so I don't want to cast it aside just yet.
So now that I have resurrected my blog site, hopefully I can keep the momentum up and meaningfully start applying myself to my open source projects and contribute to the Python community in some way, rather than spending an obsessive amount of time watching anime.