Category: Life

Full-time Freedom

“Freedom without responsibility is certainly tempting, but there are few people who will give you that gig and take care of you and take responsibility for your work as well.

Responsibility without freedom is stressful. There are plenty of jobs in this line of work, just as there are countless jobs where you have neither freedom nor responsibility. These are good jobs to walk away from.”

– Seth Godin on Freedom and Responsibility

“Contributing full time provides a ton of freedom to work and iterate on any aspect of the community you can dream up. Sounds good right? It is if you can sustain it.

Here’s the thing: burnout is a real struggle. And when you’re working on something full bore, 100 percent of the time, and you burn out, there aren’t a lot of good options to help combat that except to keep pressing on and try to get your groove back.”

– Drew Jaynes on contributing full-time to WordPress

When I joined the foundation I never thought I’d lose a super power – the ability to ignore things. 🙂 1

A New Adventure

I’m taking a position with the Wikimedia Foundation as a Community Liaison starting in late January. This is a big opportunity that will be both challenging and exciting.

I’m leaving Mercy after 4.5 years and have enjoyed my time working as an Enterprise Architect, Solution Architect, Business Architect, and Business Analyst.1 The people there have been nothing short of supportive and wonderful and I hope to stay in contact with many people who I call friends.

I’ve been involved in a tiny corner of the Wikimedia movement for a few years now and I’m excited to be able to spend more time on wiki stuff – especially when it comes to empowering people to share their experience and knowledge with nothing short of the whole world.

I also hope to work (on my own time) with the local community here in St. Louis and bring awareness to Wikimedia and the various projects we support. 2

As a liaison I’m assigned to a product team within the foundation. For me it’s the Discovery team – search, maps, and all the things that help contributors find things!

A big thanks to the folks in the MediaWiki Stakeholders’ Group for proving opportunities to learn more about the community. Thanks to the WMF for trusting and hiring me and for the individuals I interviewed with. They were honest in the details of the position and challenges in the work before us.

Thanks to those who offered to be a reference, you must have said something nice. 🙂

Most importantly, thank you to my wife Jackie and my family for making this decision with me. I’m glad we’re in this adventure together – wherever it may lead.

A Few Notes on Barcelona and SMWCon

My trip to Barcelona was an adventure that I’ll never forget. The city was beautiful and the people I met and made friends with even more so. The conference was rewarding and invigorating.

I don’t know if I have the language to put into words what I experienced. I’ve been trying to write this post for a while and continue to be fruitless. I can say, that for a person who hasn’t traveled internationally much (until this past year) it remains one of my favorite things to do. You can travel alone, but if you do it right you’ll never be alone.

So maybe I’ll just try to be as succinct as possible.

Travel. Do it often. Take photos, but not too many. Make opportunities. If invited to go out – Go.

I’ve put together some perfunctory notes on the professional aspects of the conference on the MediaWiki Stakeholders’ Blog. Again, it doesn’t do the trip justice.

This Must be the Imposter Convention

It’s hard to look at my impostor syndrome as the worst thing in the world — it has spurned me on to do better, work harder, and aim higher.  On an emotional and mental level, however, it has been debilitating and difficult to get past.  I’ve gone entire days without writing a meaningful line of code due to my lack of confidence.  Other times I take that feeling and crush it by overcoming development obstacles.

If a person like David can be as successful and well-known as he is and still feel the haunt of the imposter syndrome, then I’m in good company.