Chris McCormick

Photo by John Leonard.

Warning: post contains serious navel gazing.

Lying around in the dark trying to get my sleeping patterns back into Western Australia time from Western Scotland time has got me thinking a lot about focus and priorities.

• I used to spend about twenty hours per week in my spare time doing Free-Libre and Open Source Software. I currently manage to allocate about zero hours per week to FLOSS.

• Almost all of my time is now taken up with commercial work, social life, and family time. Although I would love to write more Free Software, I am ok with this balance for now because spending time with family and friends is definitely not the worst thing to do with your life.

• I am officially orphaning the Infinite 8-Bit Platformer project. If you are a Free Software developer interested in taking over that project please contact me! There have been a ton of irregular users but the codebase badly needs some love. It's written in Python and Pygame and is GPL licensed.

• I still get to contribute a bit to Free Software projects during the course of my commercial work - I just don't have the luxury of pioneering my other vanity projects any more - except maybe jsGameSoup which gets used by one of my clients.

• This whole shift is in general probably a good thing as it is turning me into more of a team oriented and social programmer. It forces me to re-use other people's code and work on other people's ideas more which is a good and efficient way to roll.

• I have a plan to recover some of my commercial time for specific use on Free Software again in future. This basically comes down to making a way to fund some of that time myself and still keep my family in sustenance. Hopefully that pans out!

• The one thing I wish I had more time to do is make music. I guess if I wanted this bad enough I would just make it happen but right now, no.

None of this is really a bad thing, just a fact of life. Friends and family are super-important to me right now, life is happy, and I still get to write a crapload of code for my wonderful clients and the very interesting projects they have created. :)

I'm in Sydney for PyConAU 2011 to give a talk about Infinite 8-Bit Platformer. Hopefully you've registered already because I'm very late in posting about this!

I'll post a link to the video after it goes up.

Americans! In just over a week I will be in the USA, visiting New York City, San Diego, and Los Angeles to give some workshops, take part in a panel and a gig. This is mostly for pd_LAunch, a family friendly grassroots festival of Pure Data hacking in LA, organised by Joe Deken and Theron Trowbridge. I am really looking forward to it.

Here is my itinerary:

• Wed Apr 20 - Arrive LAX
• Thu Apr 21 - Arrive NYC, attend NYCPatchingCircle
• Sat Apr 23 - Give the "Pd as your embeddable audio engine" workshop at NYC Resistor please sign up now!
• Sat Apr 23 - My pal Zachary Cale is having a launch party for his new record that night
• Mon Apr 24 - Arrive San Diego for "Puredata Reception with Miller Puckette, UCSD colleagues and students"
• Tue Apr 25 - Van it up to LA where the festival continues
• Fri Apr 29 - Give the "Pd as your embeddable audio engine" workshop in LA
• Sat Apr 30 - "Puredata Inside Out" panel with Miller, Hans, Natacha, Theron
• Sat Apr 30 - Take part in "Music with Miller Puckette and Friends" concert/party
• Sun May 01 - Flight back home (arrive home the 3rd)

For Infinite 8-bit Platformer fans this unfortunately means that the beta-builds must go on hold for a few weeks. There is one more network bug that was uncovered recently that I need to fix before releasing the builds, so that probably won't happen until I return home in early May. That will teach me to make promises and deadlines when it comes to spare time software projects.

If you are a tech/maker/software/puredata/infiniteplatformer fan/geek/contractee and are located in these times and places and want to catch up for a beer in between festivities, feel free to contact me.