Since 2013 Worker’s Day I have been working at SUSE – one year passed already. Time for a little retrospective I suppose.

TL;DR: experience so far has been nothing short of great. Dear colleagues and Spacewalk community: thank you!

Things I’ve been doing:

1. working remotely from my home, which has been a huge experience. From using the English language extensively to remote collaboration, from self-organizing my work time to choosing and fixing furniture, I surely learnt a lot about working with others while being physically alone and far away!
2. working for a big, global, open source company – organizationally, that’s as different as it could possibly be from any IT job I took in the past! “We adapt” is the company motto and a core value is embracing change – I guess I now have some idea of what that means!
3. working in open source projects: most my work is publicly available and publicly reviewed. Among other things, I contributed quite a lot of code in the Spacewalk project, which is the daddy of SUSE Manager, and I have my own project about Java packaging on GitHub. Working together with people from different communities (and sometimes working for different companies) has been even more challenging!
4. learning quite a ton of new things technology-wise. SUSE OSs, KVM/QEMU, Struts, OBS, rpm specfiles, Cucumber, Capybara and WebDriver, Maven, VisualVM, JUnit, InVision, Trello, more PostgreSQL, Oracle and Java, more Python, more Ruby, a lot more git, more Linux administration, even a bit of Docker… And this is just to name a few. Quite some more on the horizon.
5. starting to get a substantial grasp of Scrum, and also a glimpse on a lot of other related Agile practices like TDD, BDD or XP. For some reason, I could not be convinced about their advantages from books and lessons – actually practicing them every day does make a difference. Still I have even bigger expectations for next year.
6. most importantly, I had the opportunity to work and have fun with very talented people from SUSE, the Manager and the Spacewalk community. It was a fantastic experience, thank you guys!

I have a loooong list of people to thank about all of this!

First is Flavio, who introduced me to SUSE, open source development  and just too many other things.

My boss Duncan, who believed in me from day 1 (actually day -30 or so)!

All my colleagues in the SUSE Manager Team (in chronological order, can’t cheat, I have chat transcripts!): jrenner, mc, mseidl, bofh, mantel, kkaempf, mlandres, mmeister, cynthia. It’s a pleasure and a honor to work with you.

Everyone I met in SUSE – you have all been very friendly and welcoming.

Folks in the Spacewalk community, especially ggainey, tkasparek, mzazrivec, cliff, mkollar, mmraka, sherr and jsherril.
…looking forward for another great, hacking and again, life-changing year!