Re: Stepping down and moving on

[Andrew Bernard]

David,

I wish you all the very best for your future endeavours. I thank you most
sincerely for your immensely significant and important contribution to
making lilypond the exceptional tool for engraving that it is. Having tried
myself to study the source code and remaining baffled despite decades of
software development experience, I am in awe at your ability to comprehend
and extend this complex code base, for the benefit of us all. It will be
difficult if not impossible for anybody to fill your shoes. I extend my
immense gratitude to you for your tireless pursuit of software excellence.

All the best from Down Under!

Andrew Bernard


On 10 November 2016 at 04:09, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

>
> Hi folks and team,
>
> while I haven't really occupied an official function in LilyPond
> development, it's hard to deny that I have effectively functioned as
> acting chief architect and vetter (with a rather mottled performance).
>
> Partly in connection with a drop of my productivity particularly this
> year, the amount of financial support for my work from members of the
> LilyPond community went down from overall survivable to disastrous.  Of
> course this is bitter for those of you that did contribute in
> significant amounts to my subsistence but I have to be moving on.
>
> I have accepted a full-time development (and team management) position
> with another company.  Due to their project and team expansion plans,
> I will be starting already in December.
>
> This employment is in another city.  I'll be travelling back and forth
> weekly for the foreseeable future.  While I might be working on some
> LilyPond side projects interesting to me occasionally, I will not be
> able to do any serious amound of coordination or other activity
> involving me with LilyPond's community.
>
> As my communication style has proven to be a somewhat mixed blessing for
> the purpose of attracting long-term developers, I expect that this may
> help in the long run for finding a different balance of areas LilyPond
> is getting worked on.
>
> During his tenure as LilyPond leader, Graham has demonstrated that even
> without a central technical lead there is a lot of potential to focus
> the resources of people willing to work on and expand LilyPond and we
> have been continuing to reap the results of his talent for organizing
> people into useful teams even though I have not really figured out how
> to fill gaps in the various teams and tools managing LilyPond's
> infrastructure to offset the "natural" amounts of fluctuation.
>
> I'll try seeing through the release of 2.20 in the little time remaining
> to me both before and after starting my job.  My main worry is the
> current comparative amount of instability with regard to font handling,
> and my main bad taste is that 2.20.1 will not be able to support
> Guile 2: there is no way that anything deserving the label of "stable"
> and including Guile 2 will come about in the rest of my tenure.
>
> There are also several half-completed features that are a nuisance.
> I do not expect to be able to to a significant amount of work on them in
> the foreseeable future.
>
> Once consequence, of course, is that my requirement for funding is over.
> I am greatly thankful to the people who have enabled me to keep working
> on LilyPond as long as I did, but what remains in my bank account, in
> spite of being quite less than what I started with when working on
> LilyPond, is sufficient to tide me over the time to my first paycheck.
>
> So I would ask you to cancel any regular bank payments you might still
> have in place as of December: I don't see that I will have a reasonable
> chance at returning a tangible value for them.
>
> Thanks for making me stay in the pond as long as I did!
>
> --
> David Kastrup
>
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