In a classic sudden turn of events as things were settling down, someone made an offer I couldn’t refuse.
I’d thrown my name in the hat for a role and interviewed a couple times, and thought they weren’t going to make an offer. Then as I’m getting settled in at my new gig, the offer comes through, and the details lined up in the right way. Can’t turn it down.
So, I’m taking an adventure into a debian derivative’s downstream ecosystem.
That starts Monday. I hate leaving a good gig, I’ll miss the team I was on and everybody clicking so well to work together.
I’ll need to brush up on:
- Git collaboration
- Debian packaging (no exposure yet)
- quilt and the patch workflow
- C code reading for security triage
- CI failure literacy (gitlab-CI, I think?) — lintian, piuparts, autopkgtest, blhc, reprotest, test-crossbuild-arm64
- CVE triage processes
- C
- Debian backporting processes
And more. Too much to document here as I go over it.
I have to be honest, I don’t know how many more years I’ve got left to be a quick study at this kind of thing, I’m getting old and slowing down, but, the project is just so god damned interesting not to get up to speed before the start date.
I wish I could post more about it in public. Though, that may be for the best because I don’t know if the role will eat me or not. That first 90 days or so is a make or break.
On the bright side, I was able to get a prior inventions list into the working agreement so I can work on Dark Horse Linux in my free time. I wonder how much of that I’ll actually have, though.
The raise was a nice touch.
I’ve avoided Debian for a long time because of the politics at the top, but I acknowledge its impact. I remember being a kid and reading about the role Debian played in the development of the game Myst and Riven and being really interested in it. I wish I had gone that direction instead of the Slackware and Red Hat direction, but, there were benefits to that too.
Oh well. Debian, here I come.