The Open Sourcerer

2014 in review2 min read

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by

Jeff
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I haven’t blogged much in recent months, so this will be a pretty short and boring post, it’s meant as a pulse check anyway. All in all, 2014 has been a pretty intense year:

  • Re-started my company
    • Got various branding, design, marketing and research contracts. Also, management consulting assignments.
    • Had to solve a multi-month stalemate with a Research Ethics committee. Twisting Freud’s words a little: I can heartily recommend the Ethics Committee to anyone.
    • Some clients needed me to do peripheral “IT work”, so I provided sizable infrastructure & data management improvements, saved mission-critical systems from certain death, rescued kittens, etc.
  • Joined the board of directors of the GNOME Foundation to help with a non-trivial set of tasks (fighting off Groupon trying to steamroll the GNOME trademark, biz dev, ED search, and lots of legal/financial/issue handling/tough decisions)
  • Attended GUADEC 2014
  • Went to defend a (simple) case in court (not GNOME 🙂 and won. A big relief after months of angst.
  • Attended the GSoC Mentors Summit 10-years ultimate reunion limited collectors edition, to represent GNOME and Pitivi.
  • Moved to downtown Montréal in the middle of December.
    • Great for business!
    • Not great for the sleep cycle (living in a construction site means you get hammering and drilling starting at 6-7 AM). Also, got a bit of a shining moment when the fire alarm went off at -27°C and tons of water from the 8th floor started pouring down and out from the lifts on the floors below. Reminds me of what happened to Bronzemurder (it can be said that this is a metaphor for software development in general).
    • Had to split off a bunch of public utilities and personal infrastructure (including my offsite backup system and the ATSC+VoIP setup I made for 2-3 houses in the family – that blog post is in French but it seems to have gone viral, for some reason).
    • I can now happily host GNOME (and other FLOSS) contributors and friends when they’re in town!
  • Fixed the economy (nope, I’m just kidding on that one)

My accountants/tax folks are going to hate me.
With all that going on, I had to withdraw somewhat from hands-on involvement in Pitivi. Nonetheless, I’m hoping to collect information and write a blog post update soonish.
Here’s hoping to a great 2015! I will surely see y’all at LGM and GUADEC 2015.

Jeff
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