The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in weeks 40-42/2010 (October 4 - 24, 2010):

Week 40 (Oct 4 - 10):

• Releases:
  Cared that 2.9.9 building ran to completeness, and started off 2.1 Beta 1 Builds. The latter needed a fast fix for Mac repackaging and a second build to be done for it.
• Build Infrastructure:
  Blocked all updates for 2.1* on PPC due to issues with the code.
  Visited the Release Engineering and Server Ops teams in Mountain View and had some chat with them about their and our infrastructure.
• OpenSearch:
  Fixed a forgotten reference as a followup to my OpenSearch patches, so that Tools > Search the Web would work again.
• SeaMonkey Add-ons Website:
  Met in person with fligtar from AMO and discussed a number of topics surrounding SeaMonkey support on the Add-ons Website. We could resolve a few issues by giving me some privileges and getting an understanding of how things work. The compatibility center needs work to display correct numbers there - without it, even the Firefox and esp. Thunderbird numbers are wrong, when that's corrected, it should be easy to have things working for us as well.
  I need help on what should be displayed in the discovery pane and for recommended add-ons.
• SeaMonkey Future:
  Heavily discussed possible future scenarios for the SeaMonkey project and myself with Mitchell and other people at Mozilla headquarter at Mountain View. Some progress, some surprises, a lot of improved understanding. Interesting times are upcoming for sure.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Prepared SeaMonkey for the Mozilla 2.0 branch.
• German L10n:
  Did some last-minute fixes for 2.1 Beta 1 and landed another Help update from Michael.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey Developer Meeting, Thunderbird, security, Mozilla website domains, etc.

That week I did almost all my work from the Mozilla offices in Mountain View, California and had a number of personal chats with people there about all kinds of topics, mostly surrounding Mozilla, Firefox, and SeaMonkey.

Week 41 (Oct 11 - 17):

Vacation.

Week 42 (Oct 18 - 24):

• Releases:
  Shipped SeaMonkey 2.0.9 and 2.1 Beta 1.
• SeaMonkey Developer Meeting:
  The first ever SeaMonkey Developer Meeting took place in Vienna on Saturday and Sunday that week, uniting 15 people from around the world in talks about the current happenings and the future of the SeaMonkey project. The meeting was very productive, most of my time that week was spent on getting the last organizational questions resolved and the meeting underway, so not much time was left for other work (other than the releases) or even reducing the backlog from vacation.
• Various Discussions:
  Security, etc.

That week started off with getting home from California on Sunday, and directly lead to the SeaMonkey Developer Meeting, which topped it off - it ran in a fast pace but surely was quite interesting.

Meanwhile, I mostly am on top of the backlogs, but haven't really started on the various TODOs yet, the list of which is somewhat huge now. Still, I should be mostly back to normal again - the update for the current week should follow on Monday or Tuesday!

First, I know I should do some writing up of a few weekly status updates, those will follow soon - I still have a quite large backlog of TODO items from the last weeks. But here's something I want to get into the public first:

As you might know, my recent visit to the US was not just for pleasure, but also for having a number of talks with people at Mozilla in Mountain View, some of which were centered around the very core of SeaMonkey - and even about myself to some degree.

In those talks, around them, and in the followup, even during my vacation time, I came to think a lot about esp. my personal future. I knew before that I'm putting too much strain on myself currently, but having no free room for creative or visionary thinking and being constantly on edge, working mostly on "should have been done a long time ago" items instead of fun and future-oriented things even felt worse when I gained some distance to it - first with the different work environment and orientation I saw in the Mozilla offices, then with relaxing some when driving around and doing sightseeing and things like that, almost without any pressure of timeframes or things that have to be done "yesterday".

Now I surely can work in an environment where I have a list of things I need to do, but I need to get off the state where I feel that a lot of things will never happen if I don't take them on, and where I have to work overly long hours constantly just to stay on top of things. Apart from that, I need to "get a life", just for my own sanity. And finding time for finally finishing my studies and get that Master's degree would be a good thing as well.

I have been in the SeaMonkey project for a few years now, and it surely has been a fun ride, I learned that I can do and love release and project driving, that I can keep a good overview of what's going on in such a project as well as the overall Mozilla community (even though one can never know everything there), but we are at a point where both the SeaMonkey project and me need to go in new directions, and I'm not yet sure if those are aligned at all.

I'm coming more and more to think that this might be the point where I need to go a different path than this project. I'm not convinced of this view yet, but I know that my life has to change in a few ways - apart from going back to a more humane amount of work, I need to free myself from constantly fighting an uphill battle that very much of the time seems to be fought against people who actually should be friends. I want to be able to spend resources on making the web more open, to improve privacy and identity management for people on the Internet, to make social contacts a story of freedom instead of walled gardens - and I'm not sure if the road the SeaMonkey project is taking will allow me to do that, as up to this time, the routine of what I'm doing has not enabled me to do that and I don't see the playing field for our project getting significantly nicer. I'm trying to rebalance my personal priorities, and this project might not be the impersonation of those any more.

Still, I have a lot of heart in this project, I love the people working on it, who I see as very dedicated, efficient and passionate, and I surely am fond of browser/messaging integration as well as having advanced features at the top of your fingertips. Wherever I'm going, I will support SeaMonkey in the transition to the future that is upcoming for this project - and I really want to see it succeed - with or without me being actively there.

I haven't decided where I'm going or if I fully stay with SeaMonkey, and as I said, I will fully support the transition, so no need to panic or something like that. What I have decided is that I need to change my personal priorities to match the man I want to be better, and to leave some room for ideas, visions, and some "real life" (whatever that is).

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 39/2010 (September 27 - October 3, 2010):

• Releases:
  Just before I went off to fly to the US, I kicked off the SeaMonkey 2.0.9 release process to get our next regular security updates going. Callek helped with some steps along the way, so that we got everything off and builds out for testing even though I was mostly offline.
• Build Infrastructure:
  I updated Linux builders to a new gcc 4.5 and enabled that compiler, which should make us run faster on that platform and matches what Firefox is about to do as well.
  As a followup to last week's universal builds hassles, I fixed the file name they are being uploaded to, but from what I hear, now PPC is pretty broken at runtime there.
• OpenSearch:
  As probably the last large change for Beta 1, I could get reviews and and land OpenSearch support! (See also my blog post on it)
  I also did a patch for backporting some cleanups to Firefox and uploaded my current WIP states for search bar and suggestions in sidebar.
• German L10n:
  To make sure that 2.1 Beta 1 can have German L10n, I updated the German localization for dom, security, and suite directories.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey Developer Meeting, updates, 2.1b1 L10n, module owner list, Mozilla website domains, etc.

As I'm here in Silicon Valley on a mission to improve communication between different parts of Mozilla and our project, it's good to know that we have a good number of large and important changes landed right in what is to become SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 1, as well as my plate for any really larger changes in all of this release series being empty. This makes a free and easy feeling and enable me to have some vacation fun as well as those talks with Mozillians around here - and I can also highlight how well SeaMonkey 2.1 is doing when chatting with Firefox people (and Data Manager sounds compelling for some of those, too)!