New Job
What an interesting month this has been! A few weeks ago, I got leads for some very good commercial opportunities, but the other decision makers at my company decided that we should not pursue it, and stick to the educational and development sectors instead. I really wanted to chase those deals, so I sent in a proposal where I start a new company, where I’ll be doing my current job as a service to the company, and I’ll be able to take on the new, lucrative commercial work. I was real excited about starting the new company, I planned to do some groundbreaking Linux work here in South Africa…
But all of that changed just 6 days before I planned to get the new company off the ground. Word got out that I’m leaving, I even got job offers from Google and IBM, which quite surprised me, I declined and decided to go ahead with the company. I also felt that I wasn’t quite the right person for the positions they offered. I then got a real interesting offer from a local Linux company. They will allow me to bring in my customers to their company, and I will give technical guidance to their development team, and gain access to their resources for the projects I’ve planned to work on. It also means I have short-term security in terms of a steady job, and I can continue working on the tuXlab distro and some other interesting things. I’ll only be able to give more information next week, so sorry for being a little secretive here! One of the coolest things about the new job is, that we’ll play a big part in the government’s conversion to ‘FLOSS’. Exciting times!
New Blog
I also started an Afrikaans blog. I decided to make it a separate blog to avoid confusion for people who are subscribed to by blog, but who does not understand Afrikaans 
February 24th, 2007 at 8:35 am
Well done. That is rather cool.
BTW, don’t read into the google offers. They use some amazing search engine and find *anyone* who is related to linux, then offer then a job. *Everybody* that I know has had an offer from them.
http://af.afrikaans.co.za/ doesn’t seem to want to work
February 24th, 2007 at 8:36 am
Hello Jonathan,
Ek weet nie jou Afrikaanse blog miskien nog nie beskikbaar is nie, maar ek kry “Error while loading page http://af.afrikaans.co.za”
Kubuntu Groetnis vanaf die Weskus!!
February 24th, 2007 at 9:13 am
Oeps, dit is wat gebeur waneer jy blog so laat in die aand. Die link moes eintlik http://af.jonathancarter.co.za wees, reg gemaak nou!
Adrian, this was actually a direct offer, I initially received one of those emails that looked quite random and replied back saying that none of the positions are for me, and I’ll forward the mail on to the local LUG. After that I received further emails that resulted in phone calls as well where she even mentioned salaries. I’m not sure if they treat all the ’searched cases’ so seriously, but I seriously got the impression that it was a bit more than random C.V. harvesting.
February 25th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Hey. I’m not sure what you have in mind for your Afrikaans blog, but if it’s going to be similar/the same content, have you considered using HTTP’s support for multilingual sites? I guess your blog software would have to be extended to support that. You could also use an additional GET parameter (eg, ?lang=af) to override an HTTP Accept-Language headers. I’ve used the tactic successfully in the past.
Of course, if it’s going to be different content, just ignore this
February 27th, 2007 at 10:31 am
Weet enige van julle van ‘n college of trainning provider, wat baie goei linux trainning gee?
March 11th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
[…] I spent the last week in Johannesburg, at the Impi Linux offices, where I’ve been freshly employed. It’s quite exciting, our local government is making a strong move to open source and free software, and Impi Linux is already signed up to do big parts of the migration, and it seems that more and more government departments are switching fast in what seems to be a domino effect. What’s also interesting is to see how government is turning away from vendors who have dodgy policies on patents, although we have good local people to thank for increasing awareness on the patent issues. […]