I’ve always thought of myself as teacher.
But, as OSTraining has grown in the last several years, I’ve found myself moving into the role of a manager rather than a teacher.
Still, the two roles have a lot in common.
One of the biggest similarities is that you really need to be careful about the behavior you model. For example, I often used to work weekends. Some Saturdays and Sundays, I’d send emails, make site changes and be noticeably busy.
This year, I had the pleasure of doing some work with Chiara from UntilSunday.it.
Chiara helped redesign our logo and brand at OSTraining.
At the end of the year, we got a card from Chiara. If you’ve ever met Chiara, you know that she has a unique and artistic flair. She put all of that talent into one of the most unique cards we’ve ever receieved.
I apologize if my photos don’t do the quality of the card justice, but I thought it was worth sharing: Continue reading “A card from Chiara”
One of my wife’s high school friends, Todd Marrone, passed during Christmas.
Todd worked as an art teacher in Philadelphia schools for 15 years.
I never met him, but after hearing the news, my wife was telling me about him. She was showing me some of his YouTube videos, including a TED talk from 2011. It’s a beautiful talk, and from the sounds of it, a fitting introduction to Todd and his ideas about being a great teacher:
We’ve reached a milestone of sorts.
In the last few weeks I’m seeing a lot of people celebrating 10 years of contributing to open source.
Many of the most prominent and inspiring people behind the growth of Joomla, Drupal and WordPress started contributing in 2003 and 2004.
I’ve known Vic Drover for a long time now.
We started talking when he launched one of the first ever commercial GPL businesses back in 2007.
The next year, we did a Joomla class together in Las Vegas and then were two of the speakers at the first ever CMSExpo in Chicago.
We’ve keep talking almost every week since.
The summer, we reached a fork in the road with Admincredible. Members of our team were getting really busy in other areas of their life and at the same time the Admincredible platform needed a substantial extra investment to go where we wanted to take it.
We decided to look into selling. We had interested from hosting companies and development companies, but the best fit was Vic and his Watchful platform. Not only was the offer from Vic, but Watchful offers almost exactly the same service as Admincredible, so it was the smoothest transition for our customers.
Thanks to TJ and Eddie for taking the Admincredible ride with me. Thanks to our customers for taking it with us and thanks Vic for taking on it from here.
I’ve been heavily involved with Joomla and, to a lesser extent, Drupal for a good number of years now.
During that time, I’ve seen forks come and go but they’ve never really sparked my interested. Here are 6 reasons why:
#1. Money. I’ve kids, a wife and a mortgage so I need to pay the bills. There’s rarely enough money in small projects to pay the bills and forks are always small projects.
#2. Open source. I’m far more attached to open source than I am to any brand name such as Joomla, Drupal or WordPress. I work with open source because I want to see live in a society dominated by open rather than proprietary systems. A large and popular project provides a much better platform to make that happen.
#3. Chance of success. 99.9% of forks fail. In fact, 99.9% of open source project fail. People wildly overestimate how rare it is for an open source project to succeed. I saw a very naive comment on Reddit the other day: “the creation of an ecosystem is trivially easy”. Projects like Joomla and Drupal are 1 in 100,000. They caught lightning in a bottle. Your project probably won’t.
#4. People. I’m attached to the people in each open source project rather than just the codebase. I’m a trainer, not a developer, so that’s the way my mind works.
#5. Different place, same drama. I’ve heard people say that they want to start afresh to avoid the drama in the old project. Sorry, but people are people. The grass probably won’t be greener on the other side.
#6. Be different. Rather than forks, which offer more of the same for the first few months or years, it’s a lot more interesting to see something completely new. A great example is Ghost as an alternative to WordPress.
None of this is to say that forks are bad things or that you shouldn’t launch one. These are just the reasons why I probably won’t be interested.
I’m starting to think about my Joomla World Conference presentation for November.
I’m planning to talk about how people become involved in open source projects and about the legacy they leave behind when they leave. Continue reading “Can you help with my Joomla World Conference presentation?”
Six years ago, I quit teaching and became a full time web designer.
At that point I had three things to my name:
I was watching the U.S. healthcare debate play out yesterday and it got me thinking.
I thought back to when our own industry was dominated by legal arguments, most of them half-digested and poorly-sourced. Including my own.
The GPL debates in open source were not a fun time and they dragged on for years.
So, I did some looking back and unless I’m missing something, the last real argument about the GPL was in July 2010, two years in the past. Continue reading “There is Peace in the GPL World”
[UPDATE] I was nervous before posting this but want to thank everyone for the big response. I’ve heard from a lot of people today and the great thing is many of them agree: we need to raise our game. The future can be bright. There are a lot of opportunities out there for Joomla. We just sometimes need to be reminded to go and grab them.
Sorry, Disqus is being a real pain and comments are sometimes missing on this thread after a server move.
Instead of commenting, go and do something positive. You’ll feel much better, I promise. Help move us forward. Here’s one place to start.
[/UPDATE]
It’s time for the Joomla community to professionalize.
I mean that in two senses: Continue reading “It’s Time for Joomla to Become Professional”
I always cringe when seeing people try to build an open source rival to Facebook. Projects like Diaspora gain publicity as a nice idea, but get little real traction.
However, I’ve come to believe that there is a potentially viable and very real open source rival to Facebook … WordPress.
That might sound silly at first, but hear me out: Continue reading “There is an Open Source Rival to Facebook: WordPress”
Alledia.com had a really great six year run. But, I’ve moved everything over to steveburge.com. I moved for several reasons:
1) Urgency. OSTraining traffic is going up, up, up. Visitor numbers are way, way higher than this time last year. I need to move as many sites off that server as possible.
2) Business. “Alledia” isn’t really me any more. It’s a company and one that has very little to do with open source. Alledia Inc. runs AppalachianTrail.com, LakeLanier.com and LakeAllatoona.com. For practical reasons related to #1, we couldn’t use Alledia.com, but the business is now at Alledia.net.
3) A Fresh Start. The Alledia.com old site was full of 10 years of accumulated junk. It dated back to a Mambo installation from 2003 and had been migrated through a couple of domains and Joomla versions until reaching Alledia.com where it grew and mutated for six more years. It was a mess.
4) Clarity. Finally, the purpose of both sites is a lot clearer now:
Over time I’ll try to move as many of my usernames as possible from alledia to steveburge. This site is a big first step.
Welcome to my new digs!
Housekeeping note: All the old content and comments are here. The URLs are also the same, so all incoming links should still work.
