My own company started 8th year today

Seven years ago I created my one person company. And it was one of best things I did in my life.

All started in 2006 when I started doing some small paid jobs around OpenEmbedded. Small things: solving build problems, updating recipes, adding new ones. But companies prefer to get invoice for such stuff instead of just giving money…

So one day I went to city hall and created what was then called “HaeRWu Marcin Juszkiewicz”. I changed name 2 years later and got rid of that ‘impossible to pronouce’ part.

There were many different clients for my consulting work. CELF was my first one, later I dropped my daily work and started remote work for OpenedHand. When they were acquired by Intel I got quite nice offer but preferred not to move to UK so went own way. From time perspective I do not know was it right decision ;)

So I looked at market around OpenEmbedded and started working with Bug Labs and few smaller jobs for other clients (some knew me from OpenedHand times). Also had job proposal from Canonical for their newly created ARM team but nothing came from it.

Time passed. One and half-year later Canonical made another attempt and this time I though “why not?”. So I went there just to be moved outside to a team which did not have any official name (other than NewCo or New Core which you may heard somewhere). And that team became Linaro some days later.

At Linaro I did lot of cleanup in Debian/Ubuntu toolchain components, added bootstrapable cross toolchain and fixed several packages (also created some new ones). But then, just when I was supposed to move to Canonical, new things came and AArch64 took my whole time.

ARMv8 work was great time. Learnt new things about OpenEmbedded, saw how project moved during those two years when I did not follow it’s development. Och it was good time.

But good things have to end one day. And so did my time at Linaro. But at around same time I started talking with several companies around Linaro to find a new place for me.

And I found it at Red Hat. Took a bit of time to get everything set up but I think that it was worth it. But due to the fact that I am employee not contractor I will suspend and in few months shutdown my consulting company.

It served me well. I came from being person not recognizable to someone who is known by people who I see for first time. It is good feeling ;)

aarch64 company linaro openedhand openembedded poky red hat ubuntu