The past few months have been heavy for many people in the United States, especially families navigating uncertainty about safety, stability, and belonging. My own mixed family has been working through some of those questions, and it has led us to make a significant change.
Over the course of last year, my request to relocate to France while remaining in my role moved up and down the management chain at Red Hat for months without resolution, ultimately ending in a denial. That process significantly delayed our plans despite providing clear evidence of the risks involved to our family. At the beginning of this year, my wife and I moved forward by applying for long-stay visitor visas for France, a status that does not include work authorization.
During our in-person visa appointment in Seattle, a shooting involving CBP occurred just a few parking spaces from where we normally park for medical outpatient visits back in Portland. It was covered by the news internationally and you may have read about it. Moments like that have a way of clarifying what matters and how urgently change can feel necessary.
Our visas were approved quickly, which we’re grateful for. We’ll be spending the next year in France, where my wife has other Tibetan family. I’m looking forward to immersing myself in the language and culture and to taking that responsibility seriously. Learning French in mid-life will be humbling, but I’m ready to give it my full focus.
This move also means a professional shift. For many years, I’ve dedicated a substantial portion of my time to maintaining and developing key components across the GNOME platform and its surrounding ecosystem. These projects are widely used, including in major Linux distributions and enterprise environments, and they depend on steady, ongoing care.
For many years, I’ve been putting in more than forty hours each week maintaining and advancing this stack. That level of unpaid or ad-hoc effort isn’t something I can sustain, and my direct involvement going forward will be very limited. Given how widely this software is used in commercial and enterprise environments, long-term stewardship really needs to be backed by funded, dedicated work rather than spare-time contributions.
If you or your organization depend on this software, now is a good time to get involved. Perhaps by contributing engineering time, supporting other maintainers, or helping fund long-term sustainability.
The folliwing is a short list of important modules where I’m roughly the sole active maintainer:
- GtkSourceView – foundation for editors across the GTK eco-system
- Text Editor – GNOME’s core text editor
- Ptyxis – Default terminal on Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS/Alma/Rocky and others
- libspelling – Necessary bridge between GTK and enchant2 for spellcheck
- Sysprof – Whole-systems profiler integrating Linux perf, Mesa, GTK, Pango, GLib, WebKit, Mutter, and other statistics collectors
- Builder – GNOME’s flagship IDE
- template-glib – Templating and small language runtime for a scriptable GObject Introspection syntax
- jsonrpc-glib – Provides JSONRPC communication with language servers
- libpeas – Plugin library providing C/C++/Rust, Lua, Python, and JavaScript integration
- libdex – Futures, Fibers, and io_uring integration
- GOM – Data object binding between GObject and SQLite
- Manuals – Documentation reader for our development platform
- Foundry – Basically Builder as a command-line program and shared library, used by Manuals and a future Builder (hopefully)
- d-spy – Introspect D-Bus connections
- libpanel – Provides IDE widgetry for complex GTK/libadwaita applications
- libmks – Qemu Mouse-Keyboard-Screen implementation with DMA-BUF integration for GTK
There are, of course, many other modules I contribute to, but these are the ones most in need of attention. I’m committed to making the transition as smooth as possible and am happy to help onboard new contributors or teams who want to step up.
My next chapter is about focusing on family and building stability in our lives.