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I’ve never quit a job before. Well, not a real job. Quitting PC World was more than easy, it was practically required for my soul not to leave my body. Quitting Waitrose was, well, it was a freaking supermarket job. And Southampton football stadium… I just stopped turning up after one girl fainted in the kitchen from heat exhaustion. But a real, proper handing in of notice is something new – in no small part because I’ve been in the same place since my first job as a new graduate.

Not that I’m ungrateful, mind. Looking after big iron at the University of Oxford has been pretty awesome – more blinky lights than you can shake a stick at – but there comes a time when you need to think about your career, and move on to pastures new. I’m fairly sure six and a bit years is WELL past that point.

When I started looking at work, I had only a few mandatory criteria – a sysadmin job, working with Free Software, without any significant decrease to my monthly income. Beyond that… well, in this economy, who am I to argue?

What I hadn’t accounted for, however, was a job whose awesomeness can’t be contained. A job with a dedicated Free Software company whose entire staff roster, top to bottom, is filled with the most talented, smart, and generally awesome people you could hope to work with. Such a job would be a fevered dream, the mere ramblings of a madman. Yet, somehow, for the second time running, I find myself in an enviable job, working exclusively on Free Software.

Being able to show off root access to a box with 256 cores and a tibibyte of RAM is pretty cool. But you know what’s even cooler? A job where I never need to worry about openSUSE 10.1 administration ever again. A job where several of my colleagues are fellow Debian Developers, with all the prestige and knowledge that comes with such a title. And somehow, by rolling proverbial twenties, I find myself in that position.

I am very, VERY proud to say that from the start of January, I’ll be joining Collabora Ltd as their new Systems Manager.