The past 12 months have been pretty challenging to me.
University #fail
In December ’10, I’ve quit university. After 3 months of destroying my motivation to do anything, I was just fed up and I had to quit. I had to change my environment completely to fix the damage. And it took me another 10 months to come back to where I was that summer before.
Maybe it’s beyond my understanding and there’s another side to it, which I refuse to see, but can anyone who has an degree in IT honestly tell me, that they actually managed to get some value out of the studies?
Honestly, how can you expect to be anyhow motivated, if you see that you just have to pretend that you’re actually studying and still get your degree? From my experience, college is one of most demotivating, uninspiring and value-destroying places you could ever find yourself at.
Challenge wears a red hat
In fall last year I was representing vpsFree.cz at probably the biggest Czech open-source community event – LinuxAlt. By twist of fate, our table in the hall was just next to Red Hat Czech’s leading headhunter – Jiri Folta.
So we had a nice chat and in the end we concluded that if I become too bored, I can always come work for their company. Well, it didn’t take long and I was signing a full-time contract.
I have to say those past 11 months I had a wonderful opportunity to work with and learn from the best minds in open-source.
Along all, one of the most valuable lessons I am taking from there is the importance of the ability to take a step back, to think outside of the box. I’m not sure whether this is necessarily true for the whole company, but at least in the department where I’ve been involved – “Regional IT”, this was and still is a key feature, which makes what they do special. The RIT team acts like an interface between many teams within the company to get the regional IT side of things working well, so I had to improve my communications skills, because the variety of people which I needed to work with was probably as wide as you can ever find in any IT company – from really technical nerds to high-rank people managers.
Over my time in Red Hat, I’ve become absolutely immersed in the culture. People there are always so high-spirited, driven and motivated, that it makes it just impossible for you to stay outside of what’s happening. You’re almost immediately sucked in. You can really feel as a part of something – after all, this is a true next-gen business pioneer – the first company, which has proved to the world, that it really is possible to make money out of free software.
The cloudy sky needs some sunshine
This is why it’s twice as hard to let go. I am really happy at Red Hat and in Brno as well, but I can’t imagine myself being a regular employee for much longer – it’s probably just not in my DNA.
During the last few weeks, I’ve really begun to see the opportunities to make something out of this all recent cloud buzz.
In my opinion, there’s a great potential in it, but I think that the current approach of basically every cloud company is wrong. Not everything is meant to go in the cloud and yet not everything which would really be a great fit for the philosophy is being moved there.
I have a vision to make such cloud products, that people will finally be able to shine in areas where their businesses are, rather than waste their energy where we at Relbit have the expertise to help out.
And than there’s vpsFree.cz, for which I have a new vision too – we’re going to bring some good old help-your-neighbor openness and friendliness to the business of infrastructure clouds.
I’ve been given an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pursue these visions and I am not going to waste it.
That’s why I am quitting Red Hat. And moving from Brno to Bratislava – to be where my heart truly is (which is twice as true – Relbit is based there and it is also where my sweetheart lives).
Thank you, Red Hat! Thank you, Brno!
Comments
Powered by Facebook Comments