Refocussing my responsibilities within Gentoo

Posted on 18 Mar 10 at 16:19 | Tagged as ,

Today I removed myself from most of the herds and projects within Gentoo that I was (more or less) involved in. I can’t pretend I am really an active maintainer in all those herds and lately I have been noticing I am spreading myself too thin. I regularly get “pinged” or mailed concerning packages that I only tangentially am interested in or know of. In an attempt to prevent burn-out and demotivation, I have decided to refocus my activities and responsibilities within Gentoo on those things I am really interested in: Qt and related non-KDE packages, and a few miscellaneous ones (most importantly openbox and poppler).

This also means I stepped down as lead developer of the LXDE project within Gentoo, and have appointed Victor Ostorga, who has been doing some excellent work, as my successor. I am happy to have brought this lightweight desktop to my favorite distro, and I’m sure Victor will manage just fine without me (hopefully with some help from others).

All in all I should have some time freed up to do a few other things. Once again I am trying to find a position as English language teacher in China, and I want to take some time to learn a bit of Mandarin Chinese. I’ve also been bitching about KDE bloat for long enough now, and complaining there is no lighter Qt4 alternative, so I want to see what I can do about that, taking the opportunity to delve deeper into programming.

2 comments

  1. Ridai Govinda Pombo on 19 Mar 10 at 13:02:

    Ben, I just wanted to leave a thankful message for you. I’m using lxde on gentoo for more than a year, and it’s been a good experience, thanks to your work…

  2. Nathan Zachary on 21 Mar 10 at 19:15:

    Ben, I think that refocusing was probably a great idea for you. I certainly appreciate all that you do for Gentoo, and hope that this decision does indeed prevent burnout. Good luck with finding the teaching position in China!

    –Zach

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