sudo reboot

Benjy: The best-laid plans of mice...

Arthur: And men.

Frankie: What?

Arthur: Best-laid plans of mice and men.

Benjy: What have men got to do with it?

-- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series

Last year, my intent had been to post monthly updates with details of the F/LOSS contributions I had made during the previous month. I wanted to do this as a way to summarize and reflect on what I had done, and also to hopefully motivate me to do more.

Fast forward, and it's been over a year since my last blog post. So much for those plans.

I won't go into specific detail about the F/LOSS contributions I've made in the past year. This isn't meant to be a "catch-up" post, per se. It's more of an acknowledgment that I didn't do what I set out to do, as well as something of a reset to enable me to continue blogging (or not) as I see fit.

So, to summarize those contributions:

• As expected, most of my contributions were to projects that I regularly contribute to, like Debian, Apache Axis2/C, or PasswordSafe.

• There were also some one-off contributions to projects that I use but am not actively involved in, such as log4cxx or PyKAN.

• There was also a third category of contributions that are a bit of a special case. I made some pseudonymous contributions to a F/LOSS project that I did not want to tie to my public identity. I hope to write more about that situation in a future post.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the contributions I've made in the past year. Historically, my F/LOSS activity had been somewhat sporadic, sometimes with months passing in between contributions. But looking through my notes from the past year, it appears that I made contributions every single month, with no skipped months. Of course, I would have liked to have done more, but I consider the improvement in consistency to be a solid win.

As for the blog, well... Judging by the most recent year-long gap (as well as the gaps before that), I'm not likely to start regularly writing posts anytime soon. But then again, if sporadic F/LOSS contributions can turn into regular F/LOSS contributions, then maybe sporadic blog posts can turn into regular blog posts, too. Time will tell.