2 February 2015
Follow @alloyTL:DR I've had a fantastic 5 years making CocoaPods what it is today, but now it is time to care for my other babies: my new job, my house boat, and my actual baby!!! I will still work on CocoaPods, but not as much. Thank you all for a great 5 years!
I don’t know about you, but for me 2015 is going to be a year full of changes. I’ll be very busy and as such will have to make some concessions, but I’ll get back to that at the end. First, I’d like to share some of the amazing events that I will encounter this year.
New job
Starting today, I’ll commence at my new job as a mobile software engineer at Artsy. This is an exciting opportunity for me, both for the technical challenges and the admirable mission to bring all visual art online.
For now this means that I’ll be spending the better part of February getting up to speed with work at Artsy.
New houseboat
For the past decade, my wife and I have been living on a houseboat in Amsterdam and for the last four years we’ve been trying to get a new one built. This time was, unfortunately, mainly spent dealing with bureaucracy, but last year we finally got all permits approved and building commenced.
While the expected shipping date has been slowly delayed, the new boat is expected to ship in February (pun intended). Around this time, I’ll have to spend significant amounts of time on finishing work on the boat.
Actual baby
While CocoaPods and the building of our new houseboat could be considered “babies”, there is no substitution for the real deal.
I'm absolutely thrilled to say that my wife and I have been blessed with the gift of an actual human baby. We’re now at the 20 week mark, we now know it will be a boy, and that he’s in great health.
With the expected delivery set for the end of May, you can imagine the amount of time I will be spending on preparing our new houseboat for the baby.
CocoaPods
When I started on CocoaPods 5 years ago, I got to implement all the code myself and I had great fun doing that, but I have always wanted CocoaPods to be a community project and not have it stick to my name necessarily.
As such, over the past two years I have been doing less and less actual code implementation and more and more lead and maintainer coordination work. Most days I spent at least a couple of hours a day on CocoaPods. The amount of work I put in could easily be considered a part-time job.
During this time we have done an amazing amount of work, I have probably learned more about Xcode than any human should, helped more than a few people get started with open-source contributions, and helped at least a few to make their name and advance their careers. I am immensely proud of all of this and thankful for having been a part of this.
However, with all the changes for 2015 listed above, I am sure you can imagine the time constraints I will be under in this coming year. That combined with the amount of time I used to spend daily on CocoaPods work would leave little time for fun stuff to work on, lead to guilt over not getting tasks finished on time, or be feasible at all.
Therefore, I am now announcing, with slight pain in my heart, that the time has come for me to step down.
What does this all mean for the future?
I am not going away, I am simply moving more to the background. The most important parts being that I will relinquish day-to-day lead and maintainer work. These jobs will be taken over by the excellent Kyle and Orta.
Kyle will focus on the technical aspects, such as identifying issues, reviewing patches, and release management; summarized as the technical lead.
Orta, on the other hand, will focus on the user oriented design aspects, ensuring that the command-line interface and DSLs are kept as simple and intuitive as possible; summarized as the user-experience lead.
They have already gradually been taking on these roles over the past months and with great success. With the support of the other core members, myself included, I have no doubt that they will make the homestretch to version 1.0.0 a successful one.
During this homestretch there are a few fun tasks that I will then have time to work on and I can't wait to work on those and show them to you.
For now, keep being awesome. With <3 from Amsterdam.
