Hello planet / Fosdem

Jeff added me to planet back in early december (thanks!) but I have not really had the time to blog again until now.

Intro
I’m co-maintaining gnome-games with Jason Clinton. I took over from Andreas Røsdal when he stepped down as maintainer half a year ago. (thankfully Andreas is still doing cool stuff within gnome-games) I was a lot more active with making patches before becoming maintainer. Now I spend much more of my time asking stupid questions about stuff I feel I ought to know as a maintainer 🙂 I’m still feeling rather noobish and have much more to learn but I’m getting more comfortable. Do expect lots of more questions in the future though.

I contributed my first patch 1 year and 10 months ago and GNOME has been one hell of a ride since. There has been a lot of highs: first committed patch, first mention in release notes, first mention on planet, receiving an ubuntu cd in the mail and knowing that code I wrote is on that cd, getting cvs/svn commit rights, becoming GNOME foundation member, obtaining maintainership, and now being added to planet. Yay! It has all happened rather quickly and I never imagined that I would end up as maintainer. But here we are. Unfortunately this also means that I don’t know much about the history of gnome-games and I still have the feeling that I’m messing around in other peoples code. I doubt I’ll ever really feel “ownership” of the code in the way I would if I had written it myself. I constantly feel the urge to consult and ask permission of the former maintainers for big changes in the games. I’m trying to shake this off me and just go with what I think is the best decision, but it’s harder than it sounds. I just don’t have the ego to do so I think. I’m more of a consensus type of guy. Maybe I’ll get better at this with time…

I plan to blog mostly about what is happening in gnome-games and I have a lot of blog posts in my head already. I’ll try to keep it down to one or two a day though. Planet seems like a really good way to reach users, distributors and developers at the same time so I’ll (mis)use this blog a bit to kick start discussions that require feedback from lots of different people.

Boring facts and stuff:
27 years old.
From Esbjerg, Denmark.
Starting on 8th semester of software engineering in Feb.
Bribeable in: Beer, ice cream

Fosdem
I plan to go to fosdem. I have Never been to an OSS conference before so I’m quite excited. It’s not that far but going there will be rather expensive for me as a student anyway. Any advice on a cheap place to stay there is appreciated. If sharing a room with someone is cheaper I’m up for that as well.