Sebastian Bacher has been a complete, total, utter stud lately. 181 bugs closed this week.
Also, I sat down and read the open 2.10 showstopper list. The list isn’t perfect and in some ways is slightly arbitrary but it is a good start on the ‘known most embarassing open issues.’ If you have something you’d consider holding the whole release for, add it to that list.
In other, more personal news, I’ve decided to leave Novell and the monkeys. This was a really hard decision for me- I’ll likely never again work with a better team than I did at Ximian, and ironically, I’ve never felt more positive about Novell’s future, both as a profitable organization and as a free software contributor. But I realized that even while I was getting some great opportunities (team management! germany! india! $RANDOM_PLACE_I_NEVER_THOUGHT_FREE_SOFTWARE_WOULD_TAKE_ME!) in the end, my heart wasn’t in it- too many things that weren’t what I wanted to be doing. Was best for me and for the company and the people I care about to move on.
As for what is next… I plan to spend some time just being a full-time board member and bug guy, and focusing on marketing and board transparency. Past that… not sure. I’m certainly going to look hard at professional schools (and the requisite preparation for them). My father practically wet his pants with joy when I told him I’d be looking at that opportunity. :) I’ll also openly look at opportunities within software if they come my way. But for the time being I won’t be seriously pursuing anything- I want to keep taking the deep breath I took at the end of last year and refocusing myself on the fun parts of Free Software and playing with small, flat, dynamic organizations that have open, flexible communication, and seeing where that takes me.
[Along those lines, I read cluetrain manifesto last week and The Future of Work is on its way. Cluetrain had a lot of late ’90s utopianism about it, but it still had some good insights, I think, into what has made ‘working’ in ximian and with gnome so much fun for me personally. Future of Work seems to build on some of the ‘why can’t business be a democracy?’ musings towards the end of Cluetrain, but obviously I’ll have to read more of it to find out :)]