About two years ago, I was at a conference with a load of GNOME people. I mentioned over drinks to two friendly Red Hat hackers, that I had an idea about a packaging framework. It was just an idea, as I was working for a large defence company, and had precious little time to maintain gnome-power-manager, let alone start anything new.
Nearly a year ago, I was hired by Red Hat to work on power management stuff. Now, my boss is one of those cool bosses that gives you quite a bit of ‘space’ and with his blessing I started to hack on PackageKit. 18 months later PackageKit is feature-complete, and the defacto standard across a dozen or so distributions.
Every week or so, I put up a new screenshot on this blog of cool stuff I’m working on. Every week people critique my ideas, and I go away to fix them up so the next version is that little bit better. Every week a few people say thanks, and tell me I’m doing some cool stuff, which is nice.
I don’t want people to think that PK or DK-p are Red Hat projects, but the simple economics is that they pay me to hack on cool projects. Whilst working at Red Hat I’m working alongside the very best people in the industry, in an environment that rewards innovation and thinking a little bit different.
What I’m trying to say is, most things you see on this blog are possible because of Red Hat. Sometimes I feel Red Hat doesn’t get the credit it deserves. Red Hat Rocks.