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Finding reason, finding belonging
Quoting: Finding reason, finding belonging —
I’ve been around in the Free and Open Source world for over 20 years now, initially as a user but largely as a hacker. Since I started making money using (and growing) my technical skills, it never once occurred to me that I’d be doing anything other than writing FOS software. Which is why over the years as I grew up the Engineer Value Stack* in my career, I started shedding some things that once used to give my joy. With that train of thought, I almost did not go to the 2025 GNU Tools Cauldron that just concluded in Porto today.
Dear reader, if you’re expecting a review of all of the technically awesome things that happened at Cauldron this weekend, stop reading and wait a couple of days. Jonathan Corbett was there so I assume he will have something interesting to write in that space. Go watch the LWN feed and maybe even buy a subscription if you haven’t already.
So yeah, I almost decided to not go to Porto for Cauldron, because for the past year or so, I didn’t feel like I did anything of consequence in the GNU toolchain community. Sitting alone in my basement in Waterloo, I had already concluded to myself that nobody would miss that I wasn’t there. Things would go on as usual. I had already forgotten whatever work I had done over the last years; they didn’t feel valuable enough. I had concluded that I was mostly a glorified Jira wrangler (the modern equivalent of the “paper pusher” slur one could use to denigrate anybody who doesn’t do Real Work™) and I wasn’t needed.