[squeak-dev] OK, I'll throw my hat in the ring for the 2012 board

Randal L. Schwartz merlyn at stonehenge.com
Sun Apr 8 23:41:52 UTC 2012


I'll admit it.  My day job*s* consume most of my time now.  This is the
full-on opposite of the situation when I put my hat in the ring for the
2008 board.  I was broke (no income) and broken (arm) and bummed (the
market crash reduced the value of my house by a full third, putting me
heavily underwater, and my dad and uncle had both recently passed away).

But I had rediscovered this thing from my younger days.  Smalltalk,
particularly in the form of Squeak, and the Seaside framework that made
it a whole lot easier to debug webapps and carry state around.  And
GLASS, which gave me access to commercial-grade VMs when I wanted to
scale.

In the midst of so much sadness, this made me happy.  So I created a
blog, and spoke out about Squeak on a dozen podcasts (including my own).
And I spoke bravely of the "year of squeak", inspiring others (including
many of my fan base) to take a look at that silly little toy language
with decades of history.

Lots of action back then.  Lots of inspiration.

This past year, my work schedule has interrupted my attending about 20%
of the bi-weekly board meetings, and it seems like I have not much to
offer except making promises that never find time to complete, which I
regret later.

However, I'm still inspired by Squeak.  I have a client that has
committed to a major code rewrite of their customer-facing site in
Seaside and jQuery before the end of this year, so I'll be dusting off
the old images soon.  I'm also working to migrate the squeak.org
websites to a more accessible platform (running jailed in a FreeBSD VM,
on ZFS so point-in-time snapshotting and journaling are all available).

I also still have a voice and a following, and whether or not I'm
reelected to this year's board, I will still speak fondly of Squeak.

So, I beg you, if you find a candidate that's likely to make more than
80% of the meetings (and have time to take on more outside tasks),
please choose them.  But otherwise, I'm there, and will continue to do
what I can, even if it's not everything I want.

The rest of the board also said that if I don't run again this year, the
meetings will be far more boring, since I'm also the jester in the
group.

Consider this my official announcement.  If y'all have questions, I'll
watch for them here in squeak-dev.  Thank you.

-- 
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<merlyn at stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See http://methodsandmessages.posterous.com/ for Smalltalk discussion


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