From the Canyon Edge: Working on Free Software while Traveling the World

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Working on Free Software while Traveling the World

Earlier this week, I passed my 3rd anniversary working for Canonical full time on Ubuntu!

I've tried to track the fun and interesting places to which I've traveled on behalf of Canonical or Ubuntu in a (nearly) yearly blog post here and here. Actually, my sister asked me to Skype with her junior high classes this week to talk a little bit about the places I've traveled for work.

I spent a few minutes looking for those two posts and decided to organize the lists a little better for my own future reference...

2008:

Boston, Massachusetts in February for my first Canonical sprint
Austin, Texas in April for the Linux Collaboration Summit
Prague, Czech Republic in May for UDS Intrepid
Boston, Massachusetts (again) in July for another sprint
London, United Kingdom in August for a sprint
Montreal, Canada in September to sprint on Landscape
Paris, France in November for a little pre-UDS planning
Mountain View, California in December for UDS Jaunty

2009:

Berlin, Germany in February for the Jaunty Distro Sprint
San Francisco, California in April for Linux Filesystems and Collaboration Summit
Barcelona, Spain in May for UDS Karmic
Santa Barbara, California in July for a Eucalyptus Sprint
Dublin, Ireland in August for the Karmic Distro Sprint
Portland, Oregon in September for LinuxCon
Dallas, Texas in November for UDS Lucid
Portland, Oregon in December (again) to meet with a customer

2010:

Wellington, New Zealand for LCA 2010
Portland, Oregon in February for the Lucid Distro Sprint
Santa Barbara, California in March for a Eucalyptus Sprint
Austin, Texas in April for the Texas Linux Fest
Brussels, Belgium in May for UDS Maverick
Austin, Texas in June for the OpenStack Design Summit (Austin)
Prague, Czech Republic in July for the Maverick Distro Rally
Boston, Massachusetts in August for LinuxCon
Taipei, Taiwan in September for Canonical OEM Summit
Portland, Oregon in September for a customer meeting
Orlando, Florida in October for UDS Natty
San Antonio, Texas in November for the OpenStack Design Summit (Bexar)

2011

Santa Clara, California in January for O'Reilly Strata
Los Angeles, California in February for SCALE9x
Cape Town, South Africa for a Canonical Sprint
Montreal, Quebec, Canada for a Canonical Sprint
Budapest, Hungary for UDS-Oneiric (then Croatia for vacation)
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
...

2011 is shaping up to be another busy year ;-)

:-Dustin

1 comment:

Free Survey SoftwareJune 20, 2011 at 2:38 AM
I read this article, this article very informative and interesting...
Thanks for sharing info...
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Please do not use blog comments for support requests! Blog comments do not scale well to this effect.

Instead, please use Launchpad for Bugs and StackExchange for Questions.
* bugs.launchpad.net
* stackexchange.com

Thanks,
:-Dustin

About the Author

Dustin Kirkland (Twitter, LinkedIn) is an engineer at heart, with a penchant for reducing complexity and solving problems at the cross-sections of technology, business, and people.

With a degree in computer engineering from Texas A&M University (2001), his full-time career began as a software engineer at IBM in the Linux Technology Center working on the Linux kernel and security certifications, including a one-year stint as an dedicated engineer-in-residence at Red Hat in Boston (2005). Dustin was awarded the title Master Inventor at IBM, in recognition of his prolific patent work as an inventor and reviewer with IBM's intellectual property attorneys.

Dustin then first joined Canonical (2008) as an engineer (eventually, engineering manager), helping create the Ubuntu Server distribution and establishing Ubuntu as the overwhelming favorite Linux distribution in Amazon, Google, and Microsoft's cloud platforms, as well as authoring and maintaining dozens of new open source packages.

Dustin joined Gazzang (2011), a venture-backed start-up built around an open source project that he co-authored (eCryptFS), as Chief Technology Officer, and helped dozens of enterprise customers encrypt their data at rest and securely manage their keys. Gazzang was acquired by Cloudera (2014).

Having effectively monetized eCryptFS as an open source project at Gazzang, Dustin returned to Canonical (2013) as the VP of Product for Ubuntu and spent the next several years launching a portfolio of products and services (Ubuntu Advantage, Extended Security Maintenance, Canonical Livepatch, MAAS, OpenStack, Kubernetes) that continues to deliver considerable annual recurring revenue. With Canonical based in London, an 800+ work-from-home employee roster and customers spread across 40+ countries, Dustin traveled the world over, connecting with clients and colleagues steeped in rich cultural experiences.

Google Cloud (2018) recruited Dustin from Canonical to product manage Google's entrance into on-premises data centers with its GKE On-Prem (now, Anthos) offering, with a specific focus on the underlying operating system, hypervisor, and container security. This work afforded Dustin a view deep into the back end data center of many financial services companies, where he still sees tremendous opportunities for improvements in security, efficiencies, cost-reduction, and disruptive new technology adoption.

Seeking a growth-mode opportunity in the fintech sector, Dustin joined Apex Clearing (now, Apex Fintech Solutions) as the Chief Product Officer (2019), where he led several organizations including product management, field engineering, data science, and business partnerships. He drastically revamped Apex's product portfolio and product management processes, retooling away from a legacy "clearing house and custodian", and into a "software-as-a-service fintech" offering instant brokerage account opening, real-time fractional stock trading, a secure closed-network crypto solution, and led the acquisition and integration of Silver's tax and cost basis solution.

Drawn back into a large cap, Dustin joined Goldman Sachs (2021) as a Managing Director and Head of Platform Product Management, within the Consumer banking division, which included Marcus, and the Apple and GM credit cards. He built a cross-functional product management community and established numerous documented product management best practices, processes, and anti-patterns.

Dustin lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife Kim and their wonderful two daughters.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Working on Free Software while Traveling the World

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