I like to think of myself as a relatively curious person, and as a professional who builds software, that often has a lot of benefits. But one big downside is that I have a lot of itches to scratch, and I’ve never been able to satisfy them by doing just one thing. I love what our team has built at UpHex and the work we’re doing to make analytics monitoring easy for businesses everywhere. I wanted to continue using that expertise in a way that was bigger than any one company, but I wasn’t sure how to do it.

I recently caught up with a friend and colleague at Pivotal over lunch, and was astounded to hear about some of the things they’re working on. While I can’t disclose all of the internal details of what’s happening under the covers, there’s already a lot of public evidence that Pivotal is an engineering powerhouse that’s building incredible things. They are primary contributors to some of the biggest open-source enterprise projects, like Spring, Cloud Foundry, and Geode. And they provide one of the core infrastructure pieces of many modern software projects: Pivotal Tracker.

Overall, they’re a startup that’s serious about a business strategy with open source at its core. That’s something almost no other company can say, and I was impressed by the depth of the commitment there. Even more importantly, Pivotal’s jam-packed full of people smarter than I am. Everyone learns differently, but I do it primarily by immersing myself in folks that are more experienced than I am, and then immersing myself in a difficult problem while surrounded by those folks. Pivotal looked like a great fit from this perspective.

After learning more about each other and explaining our goals, Pivotal asked if I’d consider becoming an advisory field engineer. I loved the idea of combining strategic, high-level exploration of business needs with practical, real-world engineering solutions, and it was an instant yes for me.

So, effective August 1, 2015, I’ve joined Pivotal. Of course, I’ll continue to be a principal in UpHex with my wonderful cofounder Bradley Kipp, who is both a marvelous human being and a whip-smart businessperson. I’m looking forward to more new and exciting adventures with both companies!