Effective April 1, I will join Percona full-time as a consultant. I’ll be helping people build high-performance applications with MySQL, but I’ll also be continuing to develop and improve tools such as Maatkit.

This career change has been a long time in progress. I’m really looking forward to it, but at the same time it’s hard to leave my current employer, The Rimm-Kaufman Group (RKG). Working with them has been the best job I’ve ever had. But ultimately, my dream job is to help as many people as I can, and consulting will be a better way to do that.

At a time like this, I like to reflect on the trail that has led here. It’s a good opportunity to realize how fortunate I really am and fill up my gratitude tank. So I’d like to thank everyone who has …

Many may have already heard about it last week: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/in_a_vortex

Looks like that's pretty much all that will be changing for me. I also expect that the deal will make it easier to integrate more Solaris patches for lighttpd and perhaps gives me access to recent Sun hardware for performance testing. Up to now I test lighttpd on Solaris in a OpenSolaris VMware session on WinXP :)

I haven't been blogging about the things I used to -- how-tos and technical hacks -- because I've been working quite hard on MySQL Toolkit and, believe it or not, innotop. I've made it possible to write innotop plugins, which have been very useful to our team at work, and I'm working on documentation. Plugins won't make it into the upcoming release; it'll just be bug fixes and documentation. These projects have taken up most of my free time.

I've also tentatively joined a group of people working on a very large, exciting, secret project which may consume the rest of my summer and/or much of the rest of the year. (I've been turning down consulting gigs and other projects because of this). If this secret project works out, I'll be writing more about it here, you can count on that.

In the …

I've bought plane tickets to the upcoming MySQL Camp in November. This is looking like a very fun time, with lots of community members, MySQL employees, and Google developers attending. It's an "un-conference," which means there is no set schedule, and it's up to us to make out of the event whatever we wish it to be. If you've been reading my articles or using my tools, is there anything you'd like me to present on? I'd be happy to do it.