The day I took over company’s GitHub

With the turmoil I’m experiencing in my private life, I failed to realise what was going on in my professional life.

I haven’t announced it publicly because I don’t like bragging, but I changed jobs last month. If you are curious to know more details, I’m pretty confident that you can use your favourite search engine.

The first month passed almost unnoticed. Until last week. I was invited to speak at a conference about Open Source in Telcos and join a panel with the product managers of Suse (Germany), Canonical (UK) and Pure Storage (USA). I was nervous about it, but mostly because it was my first time speaking publicly as Tara. My survival instinct took over, perhaps unconsciously remembering how many times I’ve spoken improvising at conferences like that in my previous life, and things went smoothly.

While I was on my train back to London, I thought that it would have been beneficial to have an official GitHub presence for the company. It’s easy to open a new organisation in GitHub, but with the long history of this company, and given that it has about 100k employees, I wouldn’t have been surprised if something was already there. And my instinct was right: I found out that the company has two existing GitHub orgs, although almost in an abandonment state. I didn’t want to create duplicates. I like the idea that a company has a single “voice” in the community. So, I did a bit of research between GitHub and the company directory, contacted a few people in other departments explained my new role … and I became the admin in the two GitHub orgs on the same day!!! I was very excited and proud to have achieved such a success.

But on the evening of the very same day it came the realisation of the extent of the impact of my new job. And, even if a part of me is excited about it, a bigger part is petrified. And, if I was in a cartoon, a big “don’t panic” sign, followed by “okay, panic”, would have been over my head (cit from Airplane!)

I was contacted by this company because they massively run OpenStack and Kubernetes and decided to invest more in Open Source. They understood that it’s important to give back to the community, but also be part of it and drive innovation, instead of just passively accepting “products” from vendors. Those do not include just datacenter infrastructure but can potentially cover technologies like 5G and 6G.

This telco has a long history of inventions. Their labs trace back to 1909. From their R&D park, technologies such as X.25, VDSL, and MPLS were born. And now that I’m slowly realising my role after the GitHub “takeover”, I feel the responsibilities that come with that on my shoulder. I have always loved telecommunications, and I admired the people in those labs when I was a little girl. Now, I’m part of that. And, once again, I’m part of the big Open Source league.

I’m not sure how successful I will be, but I want to give it a try. I owe that to that little girl who was playing with modems and X.25 back then.

To those who know me, rest assured that, no matter what, I will always be your Tara. The annoying, messy, weird geek girl from next door. I will always geek out, play with random technologies or fly planes in my spare time. And I will always sit cross-legged on the bed ranting and talking about everything with the ones I care.