Want me to work with you?

Reach out to me – I’m currently looking for something interesting to do. https://www.linkedin.com/in/rbtcollins/ and https://twitter.com/rbtcollins are good ways to grab me if you don’t already have my details.

Should you reach out to me? Maybe :). First, a little retrospective.

Three years ago, I wrote the following when reflecting on what I wanted to be doing:

Priorities (roughly ordered most to least important):

• Keep living in Rangiora (family)
• Up to moderate travel requirements – 4 trips a year + LCA/PyCon
• Significant autonomy (not at the expense of doing the right thing for the company, just I work best with the illusion of free will 🙂 )
• Be doing something that matters
  • -> Being open source is one way to this, but not the only one
• Something cutting edge would be awesome
  • -> Rust / Haskell / High performance requirements / scale / ….
• Salary

How well did that work for me? Pretty good. I had a good satisfying job at VMware for 3 years, met some wonderful people, achieved some very cool things. And those priorities above were broadly achieved.
The one niggle that stands out was this – Did the things we were doing matter? Certainly there was no social impact – VMware isn’t a non-profit, being right at the core of capitalism as it is. There was direct connection and impact with the team, the staff we worked with and the users of the products… but it is just a bit hard to feel really connected through that though: VMware is a very large company and there are many layers between users and developers.

We were quite early adopters of Kubernetes, which allowed me to deepen my Go knowledge and experience some more fun with AWS scale operations. I had many interesting discussions about the relative strengths of Python Go and Rust and Java with colleagues there. (Hi Geoffrey).

Company culture is very important to me, and VMware has a fantastically supportive culture. One of the most supportive companies I’ve been in, bar none. It isn’t a truely remote-organised company though: rather its a bunch of offices that talk to each other, which I think is sad. True remote-first offers so much more engagement.

I enjoy building things to solve problems. I’ve either directly built, or shaped what is built, in all my most impactful and successful roles. Solving a problem once by hand is fine; solving it for years to come by creating a tool is far more powerful.

I seem to veer into toolmaking very often: giving other people the ability to solve their problems takes the power of a tool and multiplies it even further.

It should be no surprise then that I very much enjoy reading white papers like the original Dapper and Map-reduce ones, LinkedIn’s Kafka or for more recent fodder the Facebook Akkio paper. Excellent synthesis and toolmaking applied at industrial scale. I read those things and I want to be a part of the creation of those sorts of systems.

I was fortunate enough to take some time to go back to university part-time, which though logistically challenging is something I want to see through.

Thus I think my new roughly ordered (descending) list of priorities needs to be something like this:

• Keep living in Rangiora (family)
• Up to moderate travel requirements – 4 team-meeting trips a year + 2 conferences
• Significant autonomy (not at the expense of doing the right thing for the company, just I work best with the illusion of free will 🙂 )
• Be doing something that matters
  • Be working directly on a problem / system that has problems
• Something cutting edge would be awesome
  • Rust / Haskell / High performance requirements / scale / ….
• A generative (Westrum definition) + supportive company culture
• Remote-first or at least very remote familiar environment
• Support my part time study / self improvement initiative
• Salary