Steady as a rock

The past few weeks I’ve had to make some non-trivial choices regarding my future career and sadly this took up pretty much all my time. Since some people have wondered where I have been lately, I’m posting it here. Then again, most people probably won’t care so I’ll use a ‘click here to read more link’. So read more if you want to know what I’ve been up to or if you’re looking for a windows admin, linux admin or perl developer job in Amsterdam (there are many non-tech vacancies as well).

At linuxworld Utrecht this year I met Rob Strubbe, founder of Unacle. He was (and still is) looking for experienced unix/linux administrators, which is what I’m doing now for booking.com as well. Given that I wasn’t really happy with some things at my current job, I took this opportunity and went for a job interview.  The job interview went great and he wanted to offer me a job.

I also talked to my current boss about what I was unhappy about and his response was more than I could have hoped for. He did understand my problems and he offered a solution: my job will change to focus more on things I want to focus on and he will hire more people to fill the gaps that are created by a colleague of mine leaving, booking.com growing very fast and corporate decisions that cause lots of work. (So, the people who read this because they wanted a job in Amsterdam: we’re hiring. The sysadmin jobs aren’t there yet, mail me if you’re interested).

So, that left me with a difficult decision to make: stay at booking.com to hopefully enjoy a new role if that works out, or go to unacle where I probably have the chance to get to learn more about traditional unix systems. It took me more than a week to decide, but in the end I chose to stay with booking.com. Needless to say, my boss was happy and promised to hurry with putting the sysadmin vacancies online.

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately. Now I have to dive into my overflowing inbox and catch up with all that I’ve missed in the last two weeks. Wish me luck!