The Rake’s Song

today is my last day here, at Intel.

it’s been an honour and a privilege working with one of the best teams in one of the best companies in the world. as I leave behind people that humbled me and made me a better engineer, I cannot but feel a bit sad; still, all good things must come to an end — and I’m sure that the good things done will, in time, temper the bad things that happened during these nearly four years.

what will happen on Monday, I’ll leave for a latter blog post — but suffice it to say that I’m going to stick around the free and open source software community at large (and GNOME in particular) for a while longer.

I know what your question will be: what happens to Clutter’s maintainership? well, if the demise of Moblin and MeeGo, and the rise of Tizen, haven’t killed Clutter I suppose nothing short of an asteroid impact will. so if you were already planning to open the champagne bottle and celebrate me stepping down from my self-appointed position of Clutter (almost) benevolent dictator, I’m afraid you’ll have to postpone the party for a long while.

I also want to thank all the people that voted for me, as well as the other candidates in the GNOME Foundation elections for the Board of Directors.

finally, see you all at GUADEC 2012:

GUADEC 2012 Badge

where I’ll give a talk about Clutter 2.0 and GTK+ 4.0.

June Hymn

today is the deadline for submitting candidacies for the election of the GNOME Board of Directors.

I decided to run again this year: it took me a bit to get into the role, but I think I can work with the fellow Board members, as well with the rest of the people in GNOME, to ensure the proper functioning of the Foundation now.

remember: being on the Board of Directors doesn’t mean having a fancy title, or a shot at managing the GNOME project towards a technical goal; it mostly entails providing the means by which the +GNOME project can actually function. without the Board and the Foundation, we could not organize hackfests, or send people to GUADEC, or even have GUADEC.

being a Director is not a huge amount of work: a 1hr meeting every two weeks, and at most one hour every day for emails and IRC discussions; but it’s necessary work, and it makes all the difference between a functioning community that can provide infrastructure to a complex project and a project that can only use public and free services without any guarantee of continuity. imagine not relying on all the services on gnome.org; or imagine not having any funds to organize the successful hackfests we’ve had in the past few years.

if you are a GNOME foundation member, consider running – if not for a specific goal, just to help out making GNOME successful in bringing together people to provide a first class software platform.