In late 2009, I lost my job at ‘B’ and was interviewing for a position as an engineering manager at Ubuntu/Canonical for their cloud team.

I had been using virtual servers at Linode for 5 years or so and what I call the Amazon discrete services (SimpleDB and S3 – Simple Storage Services) for a couple of years, had experience in open source software and had managed teams of 20+ engineers.
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But Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s CEO at the time, judged that I didn’t have enough cloud experience so it didn’t happen.

Regardless of whether he was right or not, I was looking forward to growing my experience in cloud computing. At ‘V’, my current position, I was presented with this opportunity.

This is that story.