A Very Good Year

A year ago today, I joined Canonical to work on the Ubuntu Server.

I have been a professional software engineer since May of 2000, and this has easily been the best year of my working, professional career.

And a sincere thank you to Canonical, my team, my manager Rick, and to Mark for this opportunity. And here's to many more excellent years to come...

Although my team is dispersed across 9 time zones (UTC+1 .. UTC-8), we have spent more time together than some co-workers do in the same building. I have hosted colleagues at my home for meetings, weekends, holidays, and dinner. And we have traveled the world (Boston, Prague, London, Montreal, Paris, San Francisco, Berlin) for sprints, conferences, and meetings.

I joined a bit too late in the Hardy development cycle to drive any particular features, but I did learn many Ubuntu processes, Debian policies and packaging, and did fix a number of bugs. In my spare time, I managed to create the Ubuntu Developer Documentation Search, as well as the Ubuntu Manpage Repository. During the Intrepid cycle, I owned a couple of development items, including booting-degraded-RAID, encrypted-Private-directories. And thus far in Jaunty, I've managed to support encrypted-Home-directories (with encrypted filenames), screen-profiles, screenbin, and kvm.

I would like to express my appreciation to the Ubuntu Community for your acceptance of me as an Ubuntu Member, MOTU, and Core Dev. This is truly an amazing community of people, who's accomplishment (the ongoing release and support of the Ubuntu distribution and its derivatives) is nothing short of amazing. I have no doubt that we are changing the landscape of computing in the 21st century--from the smallest embedded devices, to netbooks, notebooks, desktops, servers, and the Cloud.

:-Dustin