This week was my last week at Intel after over 5.5 years there. My journey at Intel has been really interesting, going from Mesa development to Continuous Integration / Validation, then joining the i915 display team and realizing my vision of production-ready upstream drivers through the creation of the Intel GFX CI system! Finally, my last year at Intel was as the CI/Tooling Architect for the validation organization. There, I was writing tools and processes to improve program management and validation rather than just focusing on developers like I used to. This taught me quite a bit about managerial structures, and organizations in general, but kept on pushing me on a narrower and narrower type of work which left me longing for the days where I could go and hack on any codebase and directly collaborate with other engineers, no matter where they are.

This opportunity came to me in the form of becoming a self-employed contractor, hired by Valve. I am expecting to be work throughout the stack on improving Linux as a gaming platform, and be strengthening a fantastic team of engineers who, despite being a community effort, contributed to deliver arguably one of the best vulkan driver in the industry (Radv with ACO). This definitely brings me back to my Nouveau days (minus the power management issues) but this time I will come with a lot more experience, especially around testing and Windowing System Integration!

I am very thankful for everything I learnt at Intel, contributing to improve the quality of the drivers, and considering world-class talents as being my colleagues and friends. However, unlike traditional companies where moving to another one means changing projects and not interacting with the same people again, open source drivers trancends companies, so I know that we will still be working together one way or another!

So long, and thanks for all the fish!