dustycloud/posts/life-update-late-november-2013.md

title: Life update: Late November 2013 date: 2013-11-26 17:23 author: Christine Lemmer-Webber tags: life update, personal, mediagoblin, xudd

slug: life-update-late-november-2013

I thought I'd give a brief "life update" post. In some ways, this is a more me-centric version of a "state of the goblin" post. Life is pretty intertwined with that these days.

I gave my block o' conferencing reflections already, so we'll consider that out of the way. We're also about to put out a new release of MediaGoblin. Stay tuned to the MediaGoblin blog... it'll be an exciting one I think.

What can I say about this last year though? We're nearly at the end of it. For this last year, I ate, breathed and lived MediaGoblin. This has been simultaneously the greatest thing ever, and also super exhausting. I really have not had much as in terms of breaks, role-wise I have worn more hats than I thought I could fit on my head (among other things, this includes writing core architecture, code review, promoting and speaking about the project, plenty of behind the scenes communication, plenty of management and project administration, budgeting things, the project's "art identity", some system administration (though thankfully simonft is helping), grant writing, all the many roles that went into running the crowdfunding campaign and producing the associated video). I'm glad I was an Interdisciplinary Humanities major; it couldn't have been a more interdisciplinary year. I'm also glad I use Org-Mode; it will sound silly, but MediaGoblin could not exist without that program.

And as tiring as it may have been, I am hoping I can continue with it. The MediaGoblin community is... dare I say while admitting tons of bias... one of the best communities I have seen in free software. (Maybe even the best? Again, I am admitting bias! ;))

But Joar Wandborg summarized the situation well:

The challenge at the moment, at least from what I see, is time. MediaGoblin would greatly benefit from more resources, having either one or more funded MediaGoblin developers would greatly benefit the project, as it is now, we have a lot of separate volunteers contributing code, thus putting a lot of work on the lead developer to review code. If we could increase the throughput on reviewing by assigning more people to review it would make the lead developer able to concentrate on increasingly keeping the project coherent and flexible while moving forward.

Well said. :)

On that note, I am simultaneously working on trying to get more resources on board and growing MediaGoblin upward and outward. This is achievable, I believe, and if we can get enough resources in front of ourselves, I think MediaGoblin can easily be sustainable. But to get there, we need to split my role into multiple people. That's hard to do because splitting my role into multiple people requires more resources, but it's hard to do the work to get more resources in while I am the only full time person, even with the amazing, amazing community we have (which is, again, super amazing!). This is solvable, but as a friend of mine accurately described it over dinner, it's a "bootstrapping problem". In the meanwhile, I am also playing a role of trying to bootstrap things just so, but that means actively wearing another hat, one that the MediaGoblin community does not usually see. It's hard not to feel bad while I'm doing that kind of work, because I feel like I am neglecting other things I want to move forward. But it needs to be done. And I think we can and will get there.

On that note, we will be running another crowdfunding campaign. I won't go into details here, but I have elsewhere, and if you're interested, you can read a relevant IRC log. There will be more to say soon, and of course you will hear about it here.

Another way to summarize things: next year I want to wrap up the features we need to get MediaGoblin 1.0 out the door (and that includes federation work) and then work on pushing forward MediaGoblin adoption. Plans are moving ahead on those fronts, and I am feeling optimistic. (One way to advance those plans is, if you or an organization you are working with are interested in running an instance, do it! And even better, if you are interested in funding either us developing relevant features or helping you run an instance, by all means contact me!

By the way, have I mentioned XUDD? I don't get that much time to talk about it, but the very rare times I get to work on code that isn't MediaGoblin (sadly, it's pretty rare) I have been spending on XUDD. In short, I think the way we're writing a lot of asynchronous network applications is wrong, and I think we can massively improve the situation. XUDD is an attempt to show how I think that could happen through an implementation of the actor model in Python. The architecture is shaping up nicely, and I feel good about the ideas and directions of the project. It's too bad it's so hard to allocate time for it. As you may have guessed, this may tie back into MediaGoblin some day, but if it does it will be some time in the future.

Anyway, that's enough of me yammering on for now. I think we've got an exciting year head. Now, back to working on this release!