Some days ago was my last work day at ownCloud Inc. and I want to share my story with you. :)
It was in early 2013 when I planned to apply for Google Summer of Code. I send a formal email to the mailing list. I got a nice answer that this isn’t needed in such a formal way and that I simply should join the developers on GitHub. It was a warm welcome and I was fascinated by it. :) This was also shortly after the move from Gitorious to GitHub as hosting platform and every time GitHub shows Unicorns someone said “That wouldn’t have happened on Gitorious”. ;)
I got more and more involved into all the stuff that happens during the development of software. First I often worked on my own app (the music app) but started to look into the core bug tracker. I read a lot - did some first help on new issues - looked for duplicate issues - triaged issues (aka added labels for the subsystems to an issue) - stayed in contact with all the people that did the hard work. It was awesome - a really nice feeling about being part of it and being able to change how the software works. We had a lot of technical discussions about the underlying architecture but also about the user experience and how things should work. And I was really impressed about the forum folks that connected GitHub and the forums by posting “Yes, was reported multiple times in the forums already” or “We found a workaround - see forums”.
Then end of 2014 I started as an employee of the ownCloud Inc. to fill in the gap between support and engineering. I was one of the main contacts when it came to debugging critical issues at customers and learned a lot about how to run ownCloud in bigger scale and debug issues there. I also had the opportunity to know more about the bottlenecks of ownCloud when it is run in a setup that is (a bit) bigger than the personal server/Raspberry Pi. I really enjoyed to work with the support team as well as the engineering team. There are so many awesome people! This position of being in between those two teams showed me how both worlds think, work and act. It was a pleasure to learn a lot there. Thanks to everybody!
All of this was an incredible experience to me and I now know more about why something needs to be done in which way and what are the issues once you want to run a software in a more professional way! I really look forward to shape engineering and support efforts in the future (especially for bigger instances).
And of course I will stay part of this awesome community \o/