Opportunities…
For no real reason, in the beginning of this year, several Boosters got opportunities to develop further in their personal Free and Open Source careers. Clever folk they are, they took them. First Klaas got the chance to build the most fabulous ownCloud from the ground up, then Pavol went on to make open hardware, following where his passion was pulling him. After which Robert left to go and put more emphasis on his UX skills instead of being a one-man design agency for all things openSUSE. And finally, last month Vincent moved on to the explore the infinite possibilities of the cloud inside SUSE. All these (very positive!) changes, as you can imagine, sent the Boosters to re-treat and re-group. The results of this process you can see posted by Agostin on the project mailing list.
So that means that this post marks the official end of the thirsty thirteen. Then end of the Boosters as you knew them. Somewhat sad but boy it was fun while it lasted! We were constantly pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zones. We invested blood, sweat and tears into the projects community members (YOU!), it’s infrastructure and it’s general direction/mood/feeling. The Boosters held countless talks, workshops and informative mentoring sessions. We organized a ton of great conferences, events and the most freaky parties. We gave you the new Wiki, a usable OBS web interface, a social network and tons of other infrastructure. We always had at least two Boosters in the board, we have lead the KDE, GNOME and Release teams. We brewed Old Toad, rode the nastiest Bulls and played 8-Bit music on our Gameboys with you. In short, there was nothing we didn’t do to make it easy, comfortable and fun to contribute to the openSUSE project!
I’m proud of what we have achieved in the last three years and wouldn’t want to miss a minute of it. What I will miss is working with such a happy, crazy and most skilled bunch of people on such an awesome project. Because now, also my time to move on has come.
…for me…
I shaped, lived and breathed the openSUSE Boosters mantra: Grow community by enabling community. Now that this is not the (sole) focus of the Team anymore I’m simply going to move on to the next project inside openSUSE that gives me a lot of opportunities to work on infrastructure, project management, marketing and community building: The Open Build Service. I’m going to join forces with Adrian, Michael, Coolo, Marcus and all the others to help push the OBS, a super successful platform for Linux Developers to ease releasing binary packages, even further.
These guys are an even wilder bunch. They are all around since the very beginning of the OBS and are super-experts in their fields. The OBS Team is a somewhat smaller team, with a smaller project to care about, but for me this brings a buttload of opportunities and so I’m monster excited to join them!
… and for this blog
Plans about what I’m going to do for OBS, how I’m going to do it, with which tools and with whom you can explore on my new blog at www.hennevogel.de
I have decided that I’m going to abandon this blog and move to the one on my main page for the simple reason of not mixing things up that don’t belong together and not deleting content that is still valuable. So the blog is dead, long live the blog. Update your feed readers please and enjoy the new show :-)
All the best for your new position within openSUSE.
Sadly, the boosters have always been something like an internal group, not really open for external contributions. I on my side managed to contribute in some areas, but afair I was the only one, not on SUSE’s payroll.
The project can’t live withouth community contributions, and I always thought the intend of the boosters was to engage ppl to contribute.
I hope that newly formed openSUSE team (hey, aren’t we all the openSUSE team?), can learn from the things that went wrong in the past, and start something new.
Greets
Marcus
You were the only one who seriously tried to be part of the team that’s true. But c’mon, you were not the only one who contributed. In fact one of our premises was that we only boosted (worked on) projects that already tried to get somewhere by themselves. Projects who already had a community of people around them. Look at what we did and you’ll realize that.
I understand that it was hard to keep up with us, as we were doing this as our day job, but that’s how it was and that SUSE was paying was a good thing right? :-)
All the best for you and your future contributing to openSUSE project. OBS is a very important part of openSUSE project and that’s great that you will make it even better.
Boosters Team was for me as a soul of openSUSE project. I learn so much from Boosters and had a lot of fun with you, guys. I’m very grateful for the work you did.
Thank you and don’t forget to have a lot of fun with OBS Team =)
Alex
Will do, thanks Alex :)