I admit I’ve been depressed a bit after having looked back to year 2009 because making the summary showed that I failed in most of my Eclipse “Jobs”. Until then I’ve had a lot of fun working on OpenSource projects but still the question remains how to do a better job in 2010.
My current belief is that I tried to help in my spare time at too many places and this has to change so that looking back on to 2010 is better than it’s been to the last year.
Here are the first 2 action items
- Action-Item 1: Unsubscribe from newsgroups. Hard but saves me about 1 hour a day answering questions on platform, swt, jface newsgroups. To me it’s an imporant task every committer has to fullfill but because of action item 2 I’m not in charge of this any more.
- Action-Item 2: Those of you who are attached to the ~80 platform bugs I owned might already received a mail. I plan to step back as a platform-ui-comitter after EclipseCon. This is one of the really hard decision because getting the comittership on the platform was the door opener for me to the Eclipse Ecosystem but when looking back to the last year I’ve the feeling that I don’t deserve the committer status any more and owning bugs I’ve no time nor business use case for is harming more than it helps.
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A strange thing is that I lately had discussions with different people who stated that they wanted bring in stuff into the platform (or require bugfixes) but failed because none of the committers had enough time to work with them on their contribution. I told them and repeat it once more that I’d be willing to help them but don’t have the resources to do so.
My current hope is that I can find my way back into e4 development but if I see me failing there as well in the next 2 months I guess I’ll also step back from my committership there also (though I also believe that some things I’d like e4 come with e.g. flexible modeled workbench loading e.g. from CDO won’t be available in 1.0 then).
Tomsondev Blog 
From my perspective Tom, you’ve already paid your dues, and earned a seat at the the table. But being a committer isn’t an all-or-nothing deal–you can be a committer on your own terms, contributing what you can when you can.
This last summer I bought a house (my first one!). But with all the repairs and maintenance, my busy work schedule, and starting work with a new company, I just haven’t found time to contribute for several months. Things have now settled down to the point that I’m ready to contribute again.
Tom, if you need a break, take a break! But leave the door open for the time when you’re ready to start up again.
Tom, first off, thanks for all your contributions. It’s also fun to work with you in the open.
Second, there’s this thing called burnout. Head to the mountains and get some rest š
Thanks for all your contributions. Its helping a lot of people around.
But, do not even think about ‘unsubscribing’ from newsgroups. (its a request)