jorge's stompbox

Sorry I didn’t respond to you on IRC, I was busy swimming with Dolphins

So I’m not sure if this is a Canonical/Ubuntu thing or just a geek thing. But I’ve not taken a vacation in about a year, since I got married. They keep saying that Americans suck at vacations (apparently the Japanese are even more workaholics, but whatever). 

So screw it, for my 1st year anniversary not only did I hit up Florida but I hit up the Bahamas and swam with dolphins. It was expensive, but who cares …

I am convinced I’m getting rid of my cat and adopting Salvador, who is an amazing bottlenose Dolphin. I’m kind of a nature dork, but I did learn that all the noises they make all come out of the blowhole, not the mouth. Even though by looking at them and they do their amazing dolphin-cute things you’d think they’d be making the noises out of their mouths.

But enough about me…

Things I learned about Ubuntu by going on Vacation and then coming back.

• ~ubuntu-bugcontrol recommends that you contact individuals, this is crap, it should be team based.
• 90% of my PMs could have been handled by someone asking the same question on a public channel.
• 90% of my PMs would have been better off as emails so they wouldn’t have been lost in IRC.
• Florida is amazing, and everything I wanted to know about Florida I found on their team page. (I’m moving to Florida for a year so I wanted to check out how they roll, they apparently roll amazingly).
• 6 new Unity contributors since 11.04. Tons of bugfixes by the Italian Stallions, but some new folks (more on this later).

And the best lesson learned so far …. no matter how hard you work, it’s all ok if you’re gone for a bit.

This is a good lesson to learn. 

Pretend you decided to just follow your dreams and ride that motorcyle to the ends of the EARTH. How would your coworkers deal? And I don’t mean “coworkers” in the sense of wether you work at Canonical or not, I mean your Ubuntu teammates. 

I’d like to think that no one in the project is irreplaceable. Not because we’re each so individually amazing that we’re arrogant prima donnas, but that we recognize that our teams are stronger by intentionally mentoring folks so that the project continues to be strong even when someone is missing.