See also 2016MirantisGoals

Jay wants me to come up with some long term objects related to career development. Areas outside my comfort zone that allow for continuous learning. Some ideas that leap immediately to mind are:

• go
• distributed systems theory
• the competition (docker, mesos, cloud foundry)

Part of the implication here is that my comfort zone is Python and web-dev and OpenStack to some extent still remains not a comfort zone. It would be nice to actually understand nova to such an extent that I could comprehend it with some degree of confidence. On the other hand I'd really like to blow it into constituent parts: nova-compute at least to its own independent repo.

Alongside is also the question of "what do I want to do with my career". It's a useful question for both the medium term and the long term. For the medium term, within OpenStack, I have an irresistible desire to be involved in and engaged with politics and governance. Not because I like it, but because I can't help myself.

Longer term I have some concerns about how long I can go go on being a teenager developer. My career is somewhat in reverse. I used to be a "director" and now I prefer to be "just a dev". It would be useful to move back in the direction of director for the sake of income and longevity, if the situation was interesting enough. I can be good at it, but I'm not sure I want to be, and I'm not sure the current environments are oriented to my text-based approach to things.

From a pragmatic standpoint it would be useful to know more about hypervisors, containers and networking concepts. I used to know networking very well but it has become very complicated in the last several years with all the tunnelling and broadcast domain jiggery pokery.

Even at my great age it would be useful to have some mentoring in terms of career direction. I pretty much want to be an available smart dude who sees the gaps and helps to fill them.