{"id":3269,"date":"2016-08-15T23:29:22","date_gmt":"2016-08-15T15:29:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/?p=3269"},"modified":"2016-08-16T01:40:38","modified_gmt":"2016-08-15T17:40:38","slug":"changing-of-the-guard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2016\/08\/15\/changing-of-the-guard","title":{"rendered":"Changing of the guard"},"content":{"rendered":"

I posted a message to the internal mailing lists at MariaDB Corporation. I have departed (I resigned) the company, but definitely not the community. Thank you all for the privilege of serving the large MariaDB Server community of users, all 12 million+ of you<\/a>. See you on the mailing lists, IRC, and the developer meetings.<\/p>\n

The Japanese have a saying, “leave when the cherry blossoms are full\u201d.<\/p>\n

I’ve been one of the earliest employees of this post-merge company, and was on the founding team of the MariaDB Server having been around since 2009. I didn’t make the first company meeting in Mallorca (August 2009) due to the chickenpox, but I’ve been to every one since.<\/p>\n

We made the first stable MariaDB Server 5.1 release in February 2010. Our first Linux distribution release was in openSUSE. Our then tagline: MariaDB: Community Developed. Feature Enhanced. Backward Compatible.<\/p>\n

In 2013, we had to make a decision: merge with our sister company SkySQL or take on investment of equal value to compete; majority of us chose to work with our family.<\/p>\n

Our big deal was releasing MariaDB Server 5.5 – Wikipedia migrated, Google wanted in, and Red Hat pushed us into the enterprise space.<\/p>\n

Besides managing distributions and other community related activities (and in the pre-SkySQL days Rasmus and I did everything from marketing to NRE contract management, down to even doing press releases – you wear many hats when you’re in a startup of less than 20 people), in this time, I’ve written over 220 blog posts, spoken at over 130 events (an average of 18 per year), and given generally over 250 talks, tutorials and keynotes. I’ve had numerous face-to-face meetings with customers, figuring out what NRE they may need and providing them solutions. I’ve done numerous internal presentations, audience varying from the professional services & support teams, as well as the management team. I’ve even technically reviewed many books, including one of the best introductions by our colleague, Learning MySQL & MariaDB<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Its been a good run. Seven years. Uncountable amount of flights. Too many weekends away working for the cause. A whole bunch of great meetings with many of you. Seen the company go from bootstrap, merger, Series A, and Series B.<\/p>\n

It’s been a true privilege to work with many of you. I have the utmost respect for Team MariaDB (and of course my SkySQL brethren!). I’m going to miss many of you. The good thing is that MariaDB Server is an open source project, and I’m not going to leave the project or #maria. I in fact hope to continue speaking and working on MariaDB Server.<\/p>\n

I hope to remain connected to many of you.<\/p>\n

Thank you for this great privilege.<\/p>\n

Kind Regards,
\nColin Charles<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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