Current location:	San Diego
Current mood:	energetic
Current music:	The Sheraton's Muzak
Entry tags:	community, ingres, open source

it's a living
For a long time, I have restrained myself from writing anything significant about Ingres for a variety of reasons.  I'm ready to change that now.  I have spent three of the past seven weeks on the road with coworkers.  At the end of March, our engineering team, support team, and several other people from throughout the company got together for a "Developer Summit".  It was the first time I'd met many of the people from our Islandia and Slough offices face-to-face, and it was a really positive experience.  There was a lot of healthy debate about engineering processes, release management, and some serious brainstorming about our feature/function priorities.  Oh, and some of us talked about licensing, too. :-)  It completely reshaped some of my impressions about the company in a positive way.

The next trip was to CA World in Las Vegas.  I wasn't really excited about that one based on the guest list, but it turned out to be a lot of fun, and I had a chance to hear directly from customers about the success they've had with our database over the years.  It was also one of the first times I had a chance to talk to Roger Burkhardt, our COO, face-to-face for any length of time, which was a great opportunity to exchange some ideas.

Shortly after the CA World trip, I was officially given a new role.   I'll now be working full-time on community-related projects, including our source code release and contribution processes, university research partnerships, starting projects to verify which open source applications work well with Ingres and fix some that don't, etc.  I had been drifting toward this sort of work already with my work on http://community.ingres.com and http://docs.ingres.com, but now it's a more formally designated role (although still awaiting an official title).  I'm really excited about the change, because I think it represents a more fundamental change in how we act as an open source company, and I'll be sharing a lot more about it here and on the community site.

This week, I've been at the Red Hat Summit in San Diego, which I'll talk about in another blog over the weekend.   Now it's time to fly home...