Hi everybody! I'm sorry it's been such a long time since I've been able to do anything with Bricksmith, and that I largely vanished. My story is a sadly common one in the LDraw community: when I started my project, I was young and had lots of time. But then the pressing obligations of life crowded in and my hobbies had to be pared down. Bricksmith survived our first child and it survived the babyhood of our second child, but it did not survive her toddlerhood. It became clear that I just didn't have time to do hobby software development anymore, and I had to pull back entirely. Unfortunately, I also enjoy putting words together, which means that responding to e-mails is an involved process for me. So I wound up both abandoning the software and going completely incommunicado. I focused instead on maintaining my involvement in the physical Lego hobby, which is how Orion finally found me alive and well at BrickCon this year.
Way back in 2005, I recognized that my goal of having a family was likely to eventually kill off my software hobby. That is why I chose to release the source code from the beginning. What I did not realize at the time was that a software project isn't just writing and testing code. It's also management. There is feature planning, design work, code reviews, and administrator maintenance. While I got the source code out there, I utterly failed to set up any kind of succession plan for all those other things. And when life did indeed happen as foreseen, I had no plan ready to implement. Consequently, nothing was done.
At this point, what the software clearly needs is for me to hand over the keys. I do so appreciate the contributions others made over the years—Ben and Robin particularly. I cannot contribute anymore, but I hope that someone else can. I granted Ben and Robin admin rights on Sourceforge so now someone else can update the website and control the source code repository. If you can, I would be delighted for you to move the source code over to a system which is friendlier to contributions from others, and hopefully do a better job than I did at welcoming contributions and handing out administrator privilege more freely.
I regularly attend Bricks Cascade, BrickCon, and BrickCan; I would love it if our paths crossed in person. My favorite thing about the Lego hobby is becoming friends with all sorts of random people I would otherwise never encounter. Maybe someday I'll get to a Lego convention outside the Pacific Northwest too!
Way back in 2005, I recognized that my goal of having a family was likely to eventually kill off my software hobby. That is why I chose to release the source code from the beginning. What I did not realize at the time was that a software project isn't just writing and testing code. It's also management. There is feature planning, design work, code reviews, and administrator maintenance. While I got the source code out there, I utterly failed to set up any kind of succession plan for all those other things. And when life did indeed happen as foreseen, I had no plan ready to implement. Consequently, nothing was done.
At this point, what the software clearly needs is for me to hand over the keys. I do so appreciate the contributions others made over the years—Ben and Robin particularly. I cannot contribute anymore, but I hope that someone else can. I granted Ben and Robin admin rights on Sourceforge so now someone else can update the website and control the source code repository. If you can, I would be delighted for you to move the source code over to a system which is friendlier to contributions from others, and hopefully do a better job than I did at welcoming contributions and handing out administrator privilege more freely.
I regularly attend Bricks Cascade, BrickCon, and BrickCan; I would love it if our paths crossed in person. My favorite thing about the Lego hobby is becoming friends with all sorts of random people I would otherwise never encounter. Maybe someday I'll get to a Lego convention outside the Pacific Northwest too!