Toward the end of the last few Decembers (2018, 2017, 2016, 2015), I’ve summarized Hard G’s free software contributions for the year. Here’s the 2019 edition.
First, the numbers. About 13% of my working time in 2019 was spent on otherwise-unfunded free software work. The bulk of this (~8%) was spent on BuddyPress, with the remainder split between WordPress Core and the maintenance of other plugins. These numbers are down this year in terms of percentages (and even a bit more in terms of raw numbers – working less overall!).
BuddyPress’s major release in 2019 was 5.0 “Le Gusto”, whose headline feature was the BP REST API. The bulk of the work on this feature was done by Renato Alves and Mathieu Viet. I played a technical role early in the development process, and did some advisory work near the end. Most of my contributions to the release were on smaller tickets, such as caching improvements to the XProfile component (improvements that came in part from work on projects like the City Tech OpenLab). The majority of my BP time in 2019 was behind the scenes, particularly helping to manage security vulnerability reports and the patches/releases that addressed them.
As for WordPress Core, I spent a bit of time during each release triaging some older tickets, and shepherding a few small improvements.
I didn’t give any WordCamp presentations this year. This is a conscious choice: I’m not involved in the WP project in the way I was a few years ago, and moreover I feel it’s important that voices like mine (me specifically, and, more generally, those of us who are white+male+developers+core-committers+community-oldsters) could stand some deemphasis at community events.
As in previous years, much of my paid client work – which is not represented in the numbers above – dovetailed with free software work in various ways. The Commons In A Box OpenLab project continues to roll along, and in 2019 I spent a good deal of time working on this project. I’ve continued work on a tool that integrates WeBWorK and WordPress, which should see public release in Spring 2020. And so many of my publicly available plugins continue to be maintained as part of my client work.
Happy new year to all!
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