Hello, “real world”…

Just last month, I joined the ranks of Nick Boldt, Ian Bull, Veronika Irvine, Wassim Melhem, Eric Moffatt, Andrew Niefer, Paul Webster, and presumably many other Eclipse community members that I don’t know of, in receiving my diploma from the University of Waterloo. I officially stopped being a student and subsequently began referring to myself as being “unemployed” instead of being a “student”. While I like being unemployed, bills don’t pay themselves.

Next Monday, I will transition from the “unemployed” state to the “employed” state, entering a world that young and naive people like yours truly refer to as the “real world”. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel any pressure. For the past three or four years or so, I could do whatever I wanted and do it whenever I felt like. If I felt like playing some video games instead of hacking on code, well, I could do just that. Of course, now that somebody’s paying me for my time I don’t really have that luxury anymore. :P

This transition translates to a couple of things:

1. participation in the newsgroup/forums, it’s kind of an on and off thing for me, I tend to only post when I’m working
2. decreased activity on #eclipse, as many of you may know, supporting users in real-time requires a lot of mental physique, I may or may not continue hanging around, here’s to hoping that the channel can sustain itself though
3. more blogging, at least that’s the plan
4. naturally, the “employed” blogging corollary follows, with “the writings on this blog are my own and may not reflect my employer’s stance on the issue in question” notice

I suppose the million dollar question is who will I be working for? The answer to that question would be IBM. I don’t think this is too much of a surprise but I’ll let my readers decide in the comments. I’ve given Ian a bit of dirt in the past for the Foundation being too corporate-ish…I guess now it’s his turn to give me some. What goes around comes around, eh?

What will I be working on? I know I’ve told some people that I’ll be working on Platform/UI but it seems that fate has something I like to call the element of surprise as I was informed about a month ago that I’d be sent to the Jazz team instead (okay, you got me Wassim). Of course, I’ll still have my commit rights but my activity on Bugzilla and CVS will be taking a hit.

Thanks goes out to everyone that has helped me along the way these past few years, you all know who you are. I would however like to single out Paul for all his help on IRC, both for splitting up the user support work and for my own Eclipse-related problems, and Chris for providing me with the user-to-contributor bridge when he mentored me back in 2006 for the Google Summer of Code program. Kudos also goes to everyone on IRC. I’ve had a lot of laughs and learned a lot from all of you both with Eclipse-related material and the many other random things we felt like talking about during any given day. ;)

Before I go, I would like to express my apologies to the Eclipse community at large for making the Platform team less diverse than it used to be as an “Individual” committer has now been replaced with an “IBM” one. :O