Entries for label: catalyst

Found 2 entries.

Everywhere I look, I find Shiny

Brenda is definately getting known these days. Involved in lots of groups, starting many of them and now this.

Wellington Geek Girl Dinners obviously went well the other week but it seems to have already made news elsewhere - like on the Google Open Source blog (stumbled across in my feedreader).

Well done Brenda!

Labels: brenda, planet-geek, geek-girl-dinners, planet-catalyst, catalyst

Inserted: 2008-03-22 11:43 (1 year, 11 months ago)

Working for Catalyst in Wellington

Yesterday I was asked to write a short testimonial describing working for Catalyst and living in Wellington from the point of view of someone coming here from abroad.

A number of \l{Catalyst|http://www.catalyst.net.nz/} employees are off to \l{LCA|http://linux.conf.au/} next week and my testimonial will be placed on the back of a leaflet to be given out to prospective employees during the \l{Open Day|http://linux.conf.au/programme/open-day}.

What I'm putting here is the original version (slightly edited) though I think it will be shortened somewhat due to a lack of space on the leaflet.

- --

Testimonial

Years ago my brother told me that he couldn't see himself living anywhere other than Coventry. Coming from Liverpool and living in Manchester at the time made me wonder how completely crazy my older brother was. Of course, at that time in my life I knew I still had the world to see.

Since then I have lived in London, Frankfurt, Perth and Wellington for varying times between six months and five years. You could say that I have now seen the world. By the way, the five year stint is Wellington and still ongoing (and no, I have no plans to leave - yet). There are many reasons I could use to explain why I'm still here but for the moment I will offer just two. It's quite simple - work and play.

So let's get the mundane one out of the way first - work. Ahah, see I fooled you. Work isn't actually the mundane one of the two (neither of them are) but let's discuss work anyway. It seems that work is apparently something which is a daily grind, another day, another dollar and a myriad of other boring phrases used to describe our nine-to-five work habit. I'd like someone to show me this 'work' they speak of which everyone else seems to consider that nasty time-consumer we force ourselves to do five days out of seven in return for monetary compensation.

My version of 'work' seems to be a lot different than that most other people seem to always moan about. Of course it's a lot of hard work (and I won't be naive enough to tell you otherwise) but there are certain advantages of working for Catalyst. The knowledge and talent of the people inside Catalyst is higher than any of my previous employers and always a great source of new ideas and learning. The open source slant within the company from the outset to the newest employees is self-evident. Talking to and working with people who contribute every day to Perl, Linux, Debian, MythTV, Moodle, Drupal and various other open source projects is a big eye-opener and I feel privileged to work with such bright and open-minded friends.

And that's the other thing you'll get at Catalyst - friends, not just colleagues.

Which leads us on to play. Fridays usually kick the weekend off with drinks and food at work, which always includes homemade bread from the staff disguised as bakers. Wellington being such a vibrant and small city means wherever you go, you're sure to bump into people you know. This gives the place a nice family atmosphere though of course there are also plenty of things to do for younger couples or singletons.

Having lived in a number of cities throughout my life, I have finally settled. It seems that one of my favourite phrases at the moment is "I love Wellington, me" and whilst that's my accent talking, you can see quite clearly what it means.

There's always something around the corner, something new, something different and something challenging, in both work and play. I honestly can't see myself living anywhere else so why not come and see what you're missing out on.

Andrew Chilton - Senior Developer

Andrew has lived in 5 different countries, worked for organisations of under 50 employees and over 13,000 employees, worked in the film industry, the space industry, has an Open Source project he is proud of and has eaten well over 79 bowls of Coco-Pops in the last three years (okay, that last one isn't quite true).

Labels: open-source, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, wellington, oss, catalyst

Inserted: 2008-01-24 22:51 (2 years, 1 month ago)