What's next ... contributing of course !

So at the moment I'm runnning through 10gen's MongoDB courses and Coursera's Pensamiento Cientifico (ouch, non habla Espagnol !) and I've just started West Virgnia's SDNOPS course on Software Defined Networking.  The SDNOPS is using VM images of the recently announced  OpenDaylight project

When they're done I'll do University of Washington's SDN course on Coursera and also Startup Engineering on Coursera.  More amazing stuff !

I can't believe that there are courses covering such groundbreaking areas as Software Defined Networking, so close to my personal interests.  I'm hoping for an OpenSource cloud course covering the likes of OpenStack, CloudStack, OpenNebula etc.  It will come.  Sebastien Goasguen has started CloudStack University ... great initiative Sebastien !  Rackspace is also providing a cloud computing overview through CloudU.

All this learning is great but what's really next?
I love learning and it was a lucky if short lived job change 2 years ago which reminded me of this, with other circumstances which has put me on a pretty intensive fast track learning.  But I have to put all this to good use, in my next job, in my community.

So how can I put all this to use?

Next step is to find a project which I can contribute to.

OpenStack is the obvious choice for me and that's where I'm heading, but it's a big project with lots of code, many contributors and contributing companies and it's way of doing things.

So I'm signed up for an OpenStack DevCamp, EuroPython (particularly looking forward to the OpenStack and OpenShift sessions), Alterway OpenStack for Python Developers training and finally the excellent Upstream University mentoring in September.  Whilst there's still some training in there the goal is to start to contribute and collaborate.  If I'm not an OpenStack developer by September, time to move on ...

Of course finding a role with my current employer in SDN/NFV or IaaS/OpenStack is also a goal, despite the trend to outsource to Asia and insource to the US there are still interesting opportunities locally in France even in these hard times.