Another year in the books! As was the case in 2015, I spent a great deal of time in 2016 working pro bono on free software projects.
Of all the hours working I logged in 2016, about 32% comprised unpaid work on free software projects (16.6% WordPress, 12.2% BuddyPress, 2.2% other WP/BP plugins). This is down somewhat from 2015, for a couple of reasons. First, I logged more than 10% more total hours in 2016 than in the previous year, which means that each free software hour represented a smaller proportion of my overall work time. Second, my client work dance card was much fuller this year, which meant more deadlines and more cool things happening outside of the WordPress and BuddyPress projects (more on this in an upcoming blog post!). Finally, I’ve been making a conscious effort to throttle my free software work a bit, mainly to avoid the spectre of burnout.
I’ve continued to be quite involved in WordPress core development, though I’ve ratcheted down a bit from the fever pitch of 2015. Some notable WP features I shepherded through this year were persistent object caching for comments and an overhaul of the way that object terms are queried and cached. I also played a small role in helping the REST API endpoints land in WP 4.7.
BuddyPress continues to grow and improve, and in 2016 I increased my participation over the previous year. I spent a lot of time doing project leadership work on BP, ranging from documentation to team communication to roadmap development. I did my best to help our three most recent Release Leads enjoy a successful development cycle, and I expended a good deal of effort cleaning out some ticket backlogs. As I mentioned last year, I’m really proud of the level of professionalism and quality that BuddyPress and the BP team continue to achieve.
Here’s to a successful 2017!
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