My first calendar year with SilverStripe is almost over and I find it hard to believe that I've been living in New Zealand for 10 months now. This year was pretty adventurous and it was great to meet quite a few of you and to get the excitement and passion that you have about working with SilverStripe.
I learned a lot about what it means to be a developer or a designer and to work with the SilverStripe tools. I learned that good code is art and beautiful architecture is poetry. And I learned that an MVC is a Model-View-Controller and therefore has a sweet framework.
But most of all I learnt that the SilverStripe community is small but mighty. That all of you have a lot of passion about what you are doing and that the development of this tool is just as important to you as it is to all the people working at SilverStripe.
I received some awesome blog posts and comments from you during the last months. I always found someone to show off and share their knowledge on one of our meetups, or in reply to anyone looking for help in the forum or on Twitter. I saw great new modules coming up and heaps of pull requests for SilverStripe 3.0. You guys are truly awesome. Thanks to all your contributions throughout the year, whatever they were. You keep this tool alive and maturing.
If you work with the community you are part of the SilverStripe spirit. This spirit is alive in the SilverStripe office every day; young and very talented people with fresh ideas who want to make things happen. And I am very happy to be a part of that. It is this that truly makes my job the perfect job.
I am very much looking forward to working with all of you on new projects next year. The stable release of SilverStripe 3.0 is on the horizon, and it will come with great modules and themes, and everything will be shiny and new.
We will have more Hackfests and hopefully grow the community and get more people hooked on SilverStripe. I will do my best to support more knowledge sharing among you, although I can't answer most of your questions myself.
Speaking of support, it is important for me to remind you, that the developers working here at SilverStripe have only very limited time to work on open source support. Every day we get heaps of emails and notes from people reaching out for help while working with the CMS or Framework. I would so much love to help each and every one of you, but the SilverStripe CMS is open source, and unfortunately we don't have the manpower or resources to help you guys the way we would love to.
As a company, SilverStripe Ltd needs to make money somewhat; to pay the rent and the pay cheques. Right now the company does that by building websites or doing paid support. And although a few of our developers, like Ingo Schommer or Will Rossiter, volunteer a lot of their free time to helping you guys out, it is a constant battle to get enough time to keep it rockin'.
So my wish for Christmas from you is to help out and take on even more ownership. If you create a module put it out there, document it and support it within the home of the community. If there is a feature you would like to see changed, then take it on and change it. This is open source; you can make a change, it is up to you. You are the community. As I said once in a former blog post; the company holds it together, but the rest is all YOU.
We've got a lot to do next year. So let's pull up our sleeves and start working on it. Give it a go and be a part of our next Hackfest on 11 February, prior to the Beta 1 release.
To boost your motivation, we've created a contest together with Bluehousegroup. This is gonna be all about good design and SS 3.0, and will be our late Christmas present to you early next year. This will rock, right @unclecheese?
But more about that after I come back from my well deserved holiday! The SilverStripe Headquarters will reopen 9 January 2012.
Have a beautiful Christmas and a great start to 2012. See you all next year. I'm counting on you!
