Last Tuesday, 3 September, was my last day as a software engineer at Joyent. From beginning to end, it was truly a wild ride.

I’m deeply grateful to Mark Cavage and Bryan Cantrill for bringing me aboard. Coming from an ops-focused role at General Mills, I saw Joyent as a place where I would be pushed to stretch my engineering talents. From the first time I visited the SF office, met with the team, and discussed what a future there could hold, I knew it was the right fit for me.

True to predictions, five years in Joyent engineering meant covering a lot of ground. It was a dream come true being paid to work on open source software, especially getting to focus on operating systems for much of that time. I’m proud of my contributions, but a few in particular are personal highlights:

  • Making SmartOS/illumos “pretend” to be Linux with LX Zones
  • Porting bhyve to SmartOS (starting with Pluribus’ work), making it production-ready, and working with the upstream (FreeBSD) community
  • Taking part in Systems We Love after goading Bryan into following through on it
  • Writing kernel hotpatches and rolling them out to the Joyent Public Cloud

That said, being involved in such engaging projects did come at a personal cost. Throughout my adult life, I’ve been chronically bad at taking vacation. With the exception of a road trip to Alaska in 2011 (which was incredible, and comes highly recommended), I haven’t taken any extended intervals to get away from work. While those circumstances are primarily of my own making, it meant that by the spring of 2019, I was thoroughly burned out.

It took a while for that fact to finally sink in. Project work which would have normally kept me fully engaged felt like a chore. Despite having nearly free reign to direct the SmartOS-bhyve improvement efforts, I was not excited about the future. Advice from Ryan about his own burn-out and subsequent Summer-of-Z recovery was finally enough to convince me to step away for a while.

When it comes to “What’s next”, a substantial portion of unstructured free time is the primary focus. Autumn is setting in, here in Minnesota, which is my favorite part of the year. There are a few fabrication projects I hope to complete before it’s too chilly to comfortably work outdoors. After an adequate break from computing-heavy work, I’ll be looking forward to new projects in that frontier too.