the twenty-fifth year of my free software career
Quoting: the twenty-fifth year of my free software career —
I've been lucky to be able to spend twenty! five! years! developing free software and making a living on it, and this was a banner year for that career.
To start with, there was the Distribits conference. There's a big ecosystem of tools and projects that are based on git-annex, especially in scientific data management, and this was the first conference focused on that. Basically every talk involved git-annex in some way. It's been a while since I was at a conference where my software was in the center like that -- reminded me of Debconf days.
I gave a talk on how git-annex was probably basically feature complete. I have been very busy ever since adding new features to it, because in mapping out git-annex's feature set, I discovered new possibilities.
Meeting people and getting a better feel for the shape of that ecosytem, both technically and funding wise, led to several big developments in funding later in the year. Going into the year, I had an ongoing source of funding from several projects at Dartmouth that use git-annex, but after 10 years, some of that was winding up.
That all came together in my essentially writing a grant proposal to the OpenNeuro project at Stanford, to spend 6 months building out a whole constellation of features. The summer became a sprint to get it all done. Signficant amounts of very productive design work were done while swimming in the river. That was great.