One month at Rackspace

My official start date at Rackspace was the 31st August, so I have now been here a full month working on the Drizzle project, and so far it has been a really wild ride which I hope will continue for a long time to come.

First I should mention why I left Oracle/MySQL to kill all speculation on the subject.  I love the people I worked during my time at MySQL, they are a great and very knowledgeable team and still talk to some of them now.  Will Oracle be a good home for MySQL?  Its not for me to speculate and I will not comment on this.  My primary reason for leaving was administrative, I had a lot of payroll/expense/HR problems at Oracle after the Sun acquisition which led to a great deal of stress for my whole family.  I have always been a fan of Drizzle and have been contributing when I had spare time, I've also been a big fan of Rackspace and their work attitude/policies so I seized the opportunity when it became available.

During my time as a paid developer for the Drizzle project I have fixed roughly 30-35 bugs (its hard to get a real figure from Launchpad without opening every bug I have ever fixed).  I have also implemented the MySQL->Drizzle migration blueprint and made a start on some other cool new stuff which I will blog about soon.  We also have a beta release (if you have been living in a hole and haven't seen all the blog posts on this)!  There are two things I have found I love working on in Drizzle, diagnosing strange problems and improving the user experience.  I think the former has rubbed off from working in MySQL Support and the latter from working on the various websites at Dennis Publishing.

One of my worries was what my new team would be like, thankfully everyone in Drizzle is as warm and welcoming as my previous MySQL team and I think they are all great and very talented guys.  I'd like to thank everyone at Drizzle and Rackspace for giving me this opportunity so far and I hope I can contribute as much as possible to bring every success to both.