Moving on, aka 'New job, 2019 edition'

Since 2014, I've been working for Acquia, doing some fun work with a great team in Professional Services. I started out managing some huge Drupal site builds for Acquia clients, and ended up devoting all my time for the past couple years to some major infrastructure projects, diving deeper into operations work, Ansible, AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes in production.

In that same time period, I began work on my second book, Ansible for Kubernetes, but have not had the dedicated time to get too deep into writing—especially now that I have three young kids. When I started writing Ansible for DevOps, I had one newborn!

Also, during my time at Acquia I encountered major health issues relating to my Crohn's disease, culminating in a major surgery and a new permanent friend. I am extremely grateful to have had great benefits and understanding colleagues and managers at Acquia, in addition to a remote job that granted me flexibility during some of the worst weeks, health-wise.

For the past year, since having that surgery, my health has improved dramatically, and for the first time in years, I started considering diving into a more entrepreneurial career path. I've been running Midwestern Mac, LLC since 2008, managing SaaS products like Hosted Apache Solr and Server Check.in (both sites are still running on Drupal 7, with tons of backend microservices!), and I've always wanted to grow those products.

But doing so—and writing a book, and managing a growing family—with a full time job has been nearly impossible. Oh, also managing over 200 open source projects with over 10k forks and 20k stars (I'm sorry if I've neglected reviewing your PR for a while!).

The point of this is, I'm going to devote myself to some new ventures, focusing on a few consulting projects (mostly infrastructure-related, probably lots of Kubernetes and Ansible—more to come ?), my writing, and Midwestern Mac's SaaS products.

What does this mean for my Drupal work and contributions? Well, that's mostly TBD; currently all the sites I run personally (including this blog) are running on Drupal 7. It might or might not make sense to upgrade to Drupal 8 or Drupal 9, and depending on that I'm not sure how much involvement I'll continue to have in the Drupal community. A lot depends on where my future projects take me!

One thing is certain, though: I'm going to make an effort to get at least the first few chapters of Ansible for Kubernetes published and available on LeanPub by the end of July, and I hope to attend AnsibleFest Atlanta this September!