Let’s get started
It has been a busy year for me. At the start of the year I decided that I needed a break from university. That meant finding decent work, and through some past contacts (it really is all about who you know) I landed a pretty nice job in the Hunter Valley. Starting from the beginning of this month I now have a permanent position with the same company, which is pretty cool.
One of the realities of the environment I work in is a move to standardise on the Windows platform. This effectively means that I can’t run a FreeBSD machine at work – which means that any time I spend using or contributing to FreeBSD happens entirely in my spare time. Over the past 6 months or so my contributions have been next to nothing. In fact I have been quite slack with some PRs, which I know is not fair on our submitters. It’s a balancing act that I need to work on. The first thing I need to do is dispatch my current PRs. After that I want to get back into regular ports work, with a couple of goals:
- always give submitters an idea of when they can expect action on a PR (feedback or a commit)
- provide that action within a reasonable timeframe, or follow up with any notes and unlock the PR for someone else
Today I pitched an idea for our next meeting of the BSD User Group Sydney (BUGS) – documentation work 
The idea is to find some documentation that we can improve, and work on it as a group – probably over lunch and a beer. I like this as an activity because it’s social, and everyone can contribute in some way. BUGS is only a small group, but I received some positive feedback on IRC so I’m hopeful we can pull it off. If it goes ahead, I would like to find a doc committer to sponsor us by providing fast feedback and commits.