Late last year marked the 4th year anniversary of the formation of the CNCF and me joining The Linux Foundation:
… this also marks 4+ years since I joined the @linuxfoundation, after experiencing crazy startup growth/success at Twitter, I was looking for something more NOT startup… was somewhat suckered in by @jzemlin to join a "chill, totally not like a startup" nonprofit… pic.twitter.com/S3f5jmyqoT
— Chris Aniszczyk (@cra) December 12, 2019
As we enter 2020, it’s amusing for me to reflect on my decision to join The Linux Foundation a little over 4 years ago when I was looking for something new to focus on. I spent about 5 years at Twitter which felt like an eternity (the average tenure for a silicon valley employee is under 2 years), focused on open source and enjoyed the startup life of going from a hundred or so engineers to a couple of thousand. I truly enjoyed the ride, it was a high impact experience where we were able to open source projects that changed the industry for the better: Bootstrap (changed front end development for the better), Twemoji (made emojis more open source friendly and embeddable), Mesos (pushed the state of art for open source infrastructure), co-founded TODO Group (pushed the state of corporate open source programs forward) and more!
When I was looking for change, I wanted to find an opportunity that could impact more than I could just do at one company. I had some offers from FAANG companies and amazing startups but eventually settled on the nonprofit Linux Foundation because I wanted to build an open source foundation from scratch, teach other companies about open source best practices and assumed non profit life would be a bit more relaxing than diving into a new company (I was wrong). Also, I was throughly convinced that an openly governed foundation pushing Kubernetes, container specifications and adjacent independent cloud native technologies would be the right model to move open infrastructure forward.
As we enter 2020, I realize that I’ve been with one organization for a long time and that puts me on edge as I enjoy challenges, chaos and dread anything that makes me comfortable or complacent. Also, I have a strong desire to focus on efforts that involve improving the state of security and privacy in a connected world, participatory democracy, climate change; also anything that pushes open source to new industries and geographies.
While I’m always happy to entertain opportunities that align to my goals, the one thing that I do enjoy at the LF is that I’ve had the ability to build a variety of new open source foundations improving industries and communities: CDF, GraphQL Foundation, Open Container Initiative (OCI), Presto Foundation, TODO Group, Urban Computing Foundation and more.
Anyways, thanks for reading and I look forward to another year of bringing open source practices to new industries and places, the world is better when we are collaborating openly.