Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

I caught my wedding ring on a door handle this afternoon, and managed to wrench my finger before I noticed I wrenched it pretty hard, going by how sore my whole wrist is. The finger’s a bit wollen, I can’t get my ring back on atm, and typing isn’t much fun. Should be okay in a few days, but outside work I’m going to use this as an excuse to catch up on my backlog of books, instead of spending my evenings at the keyboard hacking away on things for Gentoo.

If I don’t catch up with folks before, I’ll see you at Gentoo UK 2006, which is in London on Saturday. This’ll be the first one that I’m not in charge of. I’m not even speaking at it, although if anyone wants to talk to me about Gentoo and web stuff, I’m sure there’ll be somewhere to go for a breakout session. It’s going to be a bit wierd, being able to go along and just enjoy the day with no pressure or responsibility, but it’s a really good feeling to see something I started carry on without needing me at all.

Which means that I really should start turning my attention towards the next step, which is figuring out how to bring all Gentoo developers worldwide face-to-face at least once a year. If there’s one thing I want to acomplish before leaving Gentoo, it’s setting up an annual dev conference. I’ve seen for myself, and heard countless stories from people from other F/OSS projects, that most of the bitching, bickering and general mis-communication is easily avoided if folks get to spend time together offline.

To do this right, we need to get the Foundation into better shape, so that it can act as the focal point for fundraising and for distributing the funds. Tbh, right now the Foundation is almost an irrelevance to your average Gentoo developer or user. A successful, annual Gentoo developer conference would be a great way to put that right.