It’s been about a month since I left Dell.

I’ve spent my time off productively, in my opinion, doing things like:

  • building an ARM/oDroid C2 based K8S cluster
  • getting Intel QuickSync/Plex working under Docker on unRaid 6
  • remodeling our downstairs bathroom
  • cleaning up my GitHub repos
  • taking my daughters to school and participating as field trip chaperone
  • rebuilding my blog
  • taking my daughters to the Maker Faire

Of course, in that time period, I’ve been looking for a new challenge. Allow me to start by saying I am quite thankful for the amount of support and messages I received offering introductions, ideas and work. I was able to reconnect with so many friends and colleagues, and I am exceptionally grateful.

I went into the process of deciding what to do with a few key focus areas:

  • I want to go back to startup-ish land. I’ve done the tiny (<100 people) startups, and they lack the stability for me to feel comfortable, and honestly I dont have the time to devote what i would need to in order to help make such a startup successful. I already know that the 70K at EMC and the 144K at Dell was simply far too large. Looking back on my history, I realize that my sweet spot has consistently been organizations between 500 and 5000 people.
  • I want to work for someone I trust. Fortunately, there’s a lot of those people. Having worked for managers of all kinds (and been one myself), I realize that I need someone who thinks like I do, who gets upset at the same things I do, but also who knows how to talk me off the ledge :).
  • I want to work in a developing space. One of the roles I considered was heavily focused on traditional VMware-based virtualization. Certainly I have the technical background, but its a mature space, not a developing one. Containers, functions, K8S, DevOps are all interesting to me right now.

With all that, I found my unicorn (I hope). I’ll be going to work at Pivotal for Chad Sakac as a Platform Architect focusing on early users of Pivotal Container Services (PKS) and helping to get them successful. The focus is to help these customers in the very early stages of their deployment of a very early product, and to drive their experiences back into engineering. There’s some ‘black ops’ work that sometimes has to be done to test customer ideas and theories along with that, and then sharing that experience with the rest of Pivotal and the world.

The job is a mix of highly technical work with K8S, VMware, Concourse along with some customer interaction, engineering feedback and some evangelism mixed in.

For me, this hits all the core things I needed - a stable but startup environment, working for someone I trust and on developing technologies.