As many around me know, I have recently moved to a new job with Canonical. This journey started quite funnily on April 18th by a Support Sprint event in our Montréal’s office. I say funnily because, while I now lives in France, near Versailles, I was born in northern Québec and I have lived in Montréal for three years before moving to France.
This Sprint week was a great occasion to meet with my new colleagues and to jumpstart my exposure to my new job by learning as much as I could about Natty, both on server and desktop with those responsible for providing top class support to our customers. But most of all, it was an occasion to meet face to face, to interact with colleagues, learn to know them and understand a bit more about the context of how things are done at Canonical.
Then a little while after coming back home, I got that email from Jono Bacon, encouraging us to do more blogging. Talk about a cultural shock ! For years, I pushed myself into maintaining an internal blog at my prior job, worrying about the possibility that it would be seen as a waste of my time by some manager. I even seen a few occurrences where very good “internal” bloggers were forced to abandon their blogging activities because of some politically incorrect statement that did not please some high ranking manager. So being encouraged to go out on the open and talk about what I do, how it is to work here at Canonical, how I think I can help improve our customer’s experience did made my day.
So why did it took me so long to react, to start writing ? Call it paranoia, historical worries, I don’t know. I also wanted to take the opportunity to take out some of the english posts out of my french speaking blog, which required some reworking of my own personal WordPress infrastructure. But that’s all done now. It’s time to go ahead and start sharing how it is like to “really” be a part of the Open Source effort.