I seem to have found myself at a crossroads. Not a personal one (well, not really) but hobby / professional. Make of that what you will.

Firstly, I’ve been doing IT support and systems administration for a living for nigh on nine years now. I’d been a Linux tinkerer well before then (I got into mail systems first due to spam fighting; Sendmail and UNIX / Linux with Slackware back in 1997). I did a long stint doing Windows Server systems admin – which is actually fairly interesting tech sometimes, even if it can be clunky and buggy – and do Red Hat for a living again now.

But it can get old. Over the years IT has become something of a “regular” service, the support staff and admin like janitors and there’s no glamour in the job. Depending on the area and your businesses’ line of work there’s fewer interesting “toys” to tinker with. This describes my situation well.

In short I think I need a good project to sink my teeth into. DotProfile is doing things I’ve already done to death (XMPP and messaging  / DNS) and I’m not really a programmer per se. I’ve done OpenID, as you can see here. Ditto IPv6, also on show here. My infrastructure does DKIM, GeoIP, SPF, greylisting, XMPP. I’ve even had a disasterous run as a Tor exit node.

I’ve been asked if I’d do webhosting – no thanks; there are far too many kids (in the literal and figurative sense) overselling their little VPS to small business for a razor-thin profit. I don’t want to get in amongst that shit, I take pride in quality servers and reliability.

Even the package repository for Fedora feels thin. There’s only so much out there in the way of interesting software to package, and even new packages in Fedora proper are getting a little obscure. I suspect most of my users are here for Courier IMAP anyway

I do memcached at work (and I’m building libmemcached in the background here, just because) but I personally have little use for it. Do I go back to my usenet roots and run INN? (Am I that much of a masochist? I remember cyclic overview rebuilds even now, they weren’t fun). I suck at art so design is out, and I just can’t consider being a bigger blogger / pundit or SEO hack without laughing at the thought. Cloud computing? Yes please – but how / who will bankroll?

I’m a systems architect at heart. /me needs a challenge, fast.

(Or I end up getting ITIL / PRINCE2 qualifications, sell out and become management )

Related posts:

1. Random musings for an autumn evening.
2. Result may be fit, social with an open messaging standard on top.
3. Vale SORBS, we’ll hardly miss ye…
4. Three little pre-Christmas requests.
5. More of Michael’s Not So Quick Tips