Jeff Mesnil
Weblog · About

I Am a Red Hatter (Again!)

March 12, 2012
Red Hat + JBoss AS 7

Starting today, I am working for Red Hat as a member of the JBoss AS/EAP team.

I already worked once for Red Hat as a member of HornetQ team, helping to write the fastest Open Source Messaging system and had a blast doing that. However, in 2010, I had a very interesting proposition to join a Web media company to develop Big Data code using Hadoop-related technologies. The job was technically interesting, the team great (I made a bunch of good friends there) but some things were amiss...

Every time I was talking about HornetQ or Red Hat in general, I kept saying "we" as I am proud of my time with the HornetQ team, a sense of achievement that I was not feeling in my new company. I also realized that I was missing contributing to Open Source projects. Having developed both closed and open source projects, I found out that Open Source development is the most satisfying way to write good code and deliver quality features. More generally, I also realized that I want to work for a company whose values I share and embrace. Red Hat has proven many times its dedication to Open Source and its community, its ability to innovate at multiple levels from the operating system to the applications and, of course, the middleware with JBoss. This is a company I was proud to work for and I continued to present HornetQ in various JUGs in France during my spare time (Lyon, Nice, Marseille, Grenoble... Any other French JUG is interested for me to come?).

When I put everything together, it was clear that I wanted to join back Red Hat. And today is the day.

I am changing teams, moving from HornetQ team to AS/EAP team. My job will be to help integrate HornetQ in the Application Server, removing some load from the HornetQ guys and being the man in the middle to smooth out integration issues to make the best messaging system and the best application server work even better together.

I am eager to work on the Application Server code. With AS7, there is a solid foundation which lays the ground for interesting opportunities with a personal interest in entreprise-level services for JVM-based languages, with Torquebox (Ruby) and Immutant (Clojure), and to the Cloud with OpenShift.

Let's put my red Fedora, I am ready to tackle great challenges at Red Hat with my team.