iBanjo

(Here’s the text of an email I just sent to the Subversion developer and user community mailing lists:)

I’ve been part of this community for a very long time, and I want to let folks know that I’ve decided to change jobs. It means I won’t be working on Subversion full-time for Collabnet anymore.

Before any weird rumors start, allow me to elaborate.

I have no grievances with Collabnet — it’s a wonderful place to work. The company deserves huge kudos for taking the time (and risk) to pay people to work on open-source software for all these years.

What’s really going on is more personal; I’m ready to move on. It’s tough to work on the same product for 50 hours a week for five years, and I’m close to burning out. I need a change. I need to work on something new for awhile. Opportunity recently presented itself (at Google, in case you’re wondering), and the job offer felt like the the next thing (and Right Thing) for both me and my career.

Ironically, this shift is happening right at the same time that Collabnet is ramping up its investment in Subversion — more people working on it, more support, more marketing. So please don’t interpret my departure as “Collabnet losing interest in Subversion”, the situation is actually quite the opposite.

In truth, I’m not particularly worried about either Collabnet or Subversion. I consider this project to be a huge success. What started out as just me, Karl, and Jim at a whiteboard (back in April 2000) has blossomed into a huge community of developers and users. Development keeps happening, and the lists are full of users supporting each other. It makes me proud!

I’m not going to disappear completely, mind you. I’m simply stepping my involvement down a notch. Instead of “obsessed guy constantly mailing the lists and driving features”, I’ll become a typical svn developer who participates in my free time. I won’t have time to read the users@ list anymore, but I’ll still be chatting on the dev@ list and in #svn-dev on irc.freenode.net.

Thanks, everyone! Witnessing the birth of a completely self-sustaining open-source project has been rather miraculous to watch. (Lucky me, I have another miraculous birth to witness in the very near future… 🙂 )