Tag Archives: intel

dawn foster

2012 Year in Review

Family Margaritas and ScrabbleEvery year, I like to write some kind of year in review blog post. I started writing these in 2007 as  a way for people that I don’t talk to very often to keep up with what I’ve been doing, but I’ve found that it helps me see what I’ve accomplished (or not accomplished) that I can use to reflect on what I want to do in the next year. You can find the 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 editions if you want to see how this year compares with previous years.

2012 in Review

This year, I spent more time doing things that I enjoyed: reading, running, working in a job that makes me happier and much more!

  • The single biggest change I made in 2012 was leaving Intel and taking some time off before joining Puppet Labs. I had been at Intel for 2.5 years (along with an earlier stint from 2000 – 2006). While I loved the people I worked with (and miss them), the job left me drained of energy, and I just wasn’t passionate about it anymore. I left without a real plan other than to take a month (or a few) off before starting anything new. I used this little sabbatical (aka funemployment) to read, run and hang out with friends. I started at Puppet Labs 7 weeks later feeling relaxed and recharged. I’m loving the work and enjoying being back in a startup!
  • I read over 70 books last year! Most of them were science fiction / fantasy, and I keep a list of everything that I read here on my blog.
  • I also ran … a lot. In 2012, I ran over 470 miles, and just over 100 of those miles were in August during my funemployment. My longest run of the year, also the longest run of my entire life, was 11.3 miles (just 1.7 miles short of a half-marathon distance). I also did some weight lifting and other workouts. Aside from falling off the wagon over the past month due to a couple of back-to-back colds, I’m feeling pretty good on the fitness side.
  • Like last year, I did a fair bit of travel. For work, I went to Brussels, Belgium; Seoul, South Korea; Berlin and Nuremberg, Germany; and Barcelona, Spain. For fun, I took trips to Hawaii, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Ohio to visit family. I even have pictures from many of the trips posted on Flickr.
  • As part of this travel, I presented at a few conferences. I did a few Tizen presentations earlier in the year, but recently, I’ve been speaking about open source metrics at LinuxCon in Barcelona and the LibreOffice Conference in Berlin.
  • I’ve also been dabbling with programming again, mostly in Ruby, since that’s what everyone at Puppet Labs uses. I’m pretty terrible at it, since I haven’t done any real programming since the mid-90’s, but it’s enough to accomplish a few simple things and be more self-sufficient. And, I enjoy doing it 🙂
  • I am still selling my vegan cookbook: What Dawn Eats: Vegan Food That Isn’t Weird. It was published last year and is available in paperback, Kindle edition and PDF format.

If I look back to what I wanted to accomplish in 2012 from last year’s year in review, I did pretty well!

  • I continued to travel and visit new places (South Korea, Spain and maybe Belgium were new last year).
  • I wanted to do runs in the 8-13 mile range and more regularly hit the gym to lift weights. I made it just over 11 miles, which is pretty good, and I did quite a bit of weightlifting, so I feel good about this one, too.
  • For several years, I’ve been wanting to do some light programming, and this is the year that I finally started real work on that one!
  • I also said that I wanted to get to a point where I can actually carry on a conversation in French that goes beyond basic greetings and travel phrases in 2012. With one lesson a week, it’s taking a while, but I’m finally getting to the point where I can carry on very simple conversations … as long as you speak very slowly, repeat yourself a few times and use mostly words that I already know 🙂
  • I failed miserably at my goal to keep my blog updated.

What I Want to Accomplish in 2013

  • Yet again, I’m going to make an effort to blog here more often.
  • I want to travel to even more new places. I’m off to a good start on this one, since I’ve already scheduled a work trip for February in Belgium, Norway and Sweden along with a fun trip with mom to Aruba in May!
  • I plan to continue meeting my fitness goals from last year with regular running, weight lifting and other activities. This will be a little more challenging because I expect to be doing quite a bit of travel this year, and working out is a lot harder when you are jet-lagged and busy working in another time zone. While I was happy with my general fitness in 2012, I still tend to eat too much, so I’ll work on that a bit.
  • I also want to continue to work on my French. I’d love to be more conversational next year and ideally, be able to read simple books and watch movies in French without relying entirely on the subtitles.
  • I hope to spend more time writing code. In addition to being more self-sufficient, I would also like to learn how to not suck at it by spending the time to learn how to do things properly rather than just doing whatever gets the job done the fastest.
  • While I want to continue to read, I actually need to pull back on that a bit. I love reading, but it’s taking too much time away from other activities, so I’m going to try to read a bit less to free up more time to actually do the things mentioned above!
career

Leaving Intel and Moving On

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After over two years of leading the community efforts for the Open Source Technology Center, I have decided to leave Intel. This was a really tough decision for me, but the reality is that the job isn’t the right fit for me right now for a variety of reasons. I want to thank the management of the Open Source Technology Center for working with me during the process of trying to make the job work better for me. It’s a great team of people who continue to do really interesting work in open source.

But, it was more than just the job. I’ve worked in large companies and startups, and I’ve realized that I really want to get back into a startup again. I miss the energy of working in a startup where everything moves faster than in a large corporation.

I’ll be taking the rest of August mostly off to relax and work on a few geeky personal projects. Starting in September, I’ll either take a full-time job or do some consulting while I continue to look for the right opportunity. I’ve already starting talking to a few people, and I would like to eventually land at a startup in a Director / VP level community, evangelist or open source position. I’m willing to take my time to find the right fit, and that includes finding a job where I can live in Portland, but travel to other places as needed.

I feel very fortunate to have some flexibility and other options that allow me to make this move now. As a result, my last day at Intel will be August 7. While I will miss many of the friends and smart people I’ve worked with at Intel, I feel like this is the right decision for me at this time.

Photo by Patrick McGarvey used under a Creative Commons license. A side note: this is one of my favorite roller coasters, The Maverick, at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, and I plan to ride it on vacation next week! 🙂

intel

Joining Intel as Community Manager for MeeGo

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MeeGo_logo_gmBig changes are coming my way in March. I will be joining Intel on March 1 as Intel’s community manager for the newly formed MeeGo open source community. MeeGo was formed out of a merging of the Moblin and Maemo communities, and I am really excited about the opportunity to work on this new project. As I dig into MeeGo and get more familiar with my specific role, I’ll post more details about exactly what I’ll be doing.

This is my second tour at Intel; I first worked at Intel from 2000 – 2006. At that time, I had never worked for a company with less than 20,000 employees. All of my work experience was in large corporations, but I had no startup experience. I left Intel specifically to spend a few years working in much smaller startups and to focus on roles where I would be building online communities. I worked in 2 startups, including Jive Software where I built and managed the Jivespace developer community. When I joined Jive, there were only 50 employees, and a year later when there were nearly 150 people, it started to feel less like a startup. At that point, I decided that it was time for me to break out on my own to do freelance consulting, which was something I had been wanting to do for a while. Freelancing was another first for me, since I had never owned my own business or done any outside consulting.

I have been consulting for almost 2 years, and there are parts of it that I love and parts that aren’t as awesome. I love working with clients to build communities and having copious amounts of flexibility in my schedule and working arrangements. However, I don’t enjoy doing business development, invoicing, and many of the other tedious business tasks. As a freelancer, I pay more in taxes and many things become much more complex, difficult and time consuming: health insurance, retirement savings, etc. There are also the inevitable ups and downs that cause plenty of stress when you are trying to line up that next gig to replace the one that is wrapping up.

The biggest challenge for me is one that sounds almost counter-intuitive, but it is the biggest issue that I have with my freelancing career. By becoming a freelancer, I took my hobbies and turned them into paying gigs. Sounds awesome, doesn’t it? Well, it was great … at first. Recently, I realized that many of the things that I used to do for fun now seemed like work, and they became less fun over time. All of a sudden, activities like blogging, attending events, speaking at events, and more felt like a big weight on my shoulders, since I needed to use these as ways to generate more business. They started to feel more like marketing and less like something that I was passionate about and doing for fun. All of a sudden, my hobbies had mostly disappeared, and I was spending all of my time doing things that felt like work, which has left me burned out. This is the primary reason that I recently decided to go back to corporate life.

I’ve been doing a bit of consulting at Intel, and I’ve enjoyed seeing some of the changes that have happened while I was gone. I’ll be joining the Open Source Technology Center, which has grown since I left, but I still have many friends working on open source at Intel, and I am eager to work with them again. I’ve also been really impressed with how other groups at Intel have embraced social efforts through the work of people like Josh Bancroft, Kelly Feller, Bryan Rhoads and many others.

I’m looking forward to working on MeeGo and am truly excited to be going back to Intel.