Farewell, ownCloud Inc.

I have been a contributor to the ownCloud project since the beginning of 2012. Starting as a volunteer my contributions were small. I joined the IRC channel, helped people out there and only over time I did start working with the code base more deeply.

The community aspect has always been my main fascination. Seeing people from all over the world, people with different background yet similar interests work together on a project, help each other out, create something they believe in and build strong friendships in the process was delightful, it took hold of me and wouldn’t let go. And so I started contributing myself which wasn’t as easy as it might seem to be. My first code contributions, in fact, (a reflected Cross-Site Scripting security patch) was actually submitted by somebody else for me as until then I never really used git in bigger scale development environments before.

Only a few days later I got a crash course on git by the friendly folks in the ownCloud community and got my own commit access. Four years later I’m in the top 5 of the overall contributors for the server core of ownCloud.

In the last nearly two years my work on ownCloud has been full-time. I have been employed by ownCloud Inc. as Security Engineer and so I was responsible for leading the security efforts and looking back I think we’ve done great job so far. This blog post gives you an idea of our accomplishments. The collaboration with HackerOne may not be the biggest but in my opinion surely one of the coolest things I’ve been involved in.

However, it is time to announce that I’ve handed in my resignation and Friday the 13th has been my last working day. From now on ownCloud Inc. and I will go our own, separate ways. As for me, I still believe in the open-source project as well as community-driven development. For these reasons I am staying within the ownCloud community, just not as an employee of ownCloud Inc. anymore. I will share with you where I’m heading to next in June.