Today is the end of an era. After almost 5 years, this is my last day at Catalyst.

I started working at Catalyst in May 2004. I had about 2 years experience working in the Industry, but I'd never worked on Open Source before. I used Open Source happily, but had no idea that I could be a contributor. Suddenly, that was all to change.

My introduction into the Open Source world was through The NZ Open Source Virtual Learning Environment (NZ(OS)VLE) project, which was a NZ-Government funded project to deliver a Learning Management System that could be deployed through NZ at low cost, to encourage collaboration between all the institutions participating.

And man we did a lot of awesome work on that project. Suddenly there was Moodle being used all through NZ. The Open Polytech deployed it, and at the time it was the largest installation of Moodle in the world. I used to wake up every morning and fix performance issues, I did a huge amount of work for Postgres support, I was pretty much paid to work on Open Source full time.

Eventually NZVLE funding ran out, and we started working on commercial Moodle projects - still managing to keep a happy balance with Open Source. The elearning team, which I was the second member of by about 3 months, grew.

Mid 2006, I started working on another government funded project, to deliver a portfolio system. This was to be what NZVLE was to Learning Management Systems, to portfolios. I started off co-leading this project, that would grow into Mahara, and I fell in love with it.

Eventually, various circumstances dictated that I had to work on other projects for a while, and Mahara fell away from me into other capable hands.

Life continued. Other than the projects I worked on by day, I also collaborated with various people on other projects under the roof of Catalyst - SuperHappyDevHouse the NZ edition was born, Linuxchix stuff happened, Linux installfests, Planet Catalyst was started, at first subversively. I did mentoring, I travelled quite a lot to talk at conferences about the work we were doing, I wrote articles, I helped start the Eight....

Catalyst began to feel like a family to me - there were people there who were like cousins, some like brothers and sisters, again others favourite aunts and uncles. I don't think a single day went by where I didn't learn some new cool computer thing. Traditions were started and continued: beer o'clock, pizza thursday, hot teen vindaloos, special coffee, mjollniraptors, hot cold hot cold, g<tab>, foosball, "where's $person?" emails, so's your face, boozey lunch, thrash metal Friday, bubble wrap, red liquorice bribes, step mania, haiku battles...

But like most young New Zealanders, I wanted to travel. The mjollniraptor was to become the Inter Continental Ballistic Mjollniraptor. After a few months in London, it became clear that Catalyst UK didn't hold much appeal for me, and there were many reasons for me to go to Switzerland. Liip offered me a job and I happily accepted, and look forward to starting with them on Monday.

I'm not sure whether it's completely ridiculous or perfectly appropriate that my last day at Catalyst is Black Friday, but here ends my journey with you for now. Ka kite ano, so long & thanks for all the beer, g<tab> etc.



Edit: The most recent explodingdog is incredibly appropriate:

I am too cold to work