In Libreplan, State of the Union 2015, I want to talk about what happened this year and what my plans are for the next.
One year as past since I took over as project leader for the open source LibrePlan project from the excellent people of Igalia. Of course that is not my complete involvement with the project. I started as the Dutch language translator some 3 years ago. This year a lot has happened and a lot didn’t happen.
I would like to share with you my adventures with the LibrePlan project. I would like to tell you what happened this year, what didn’t happen and what will happen in the, hopefully near, future.
What did happen?
- I wrote “LibrePlan, the missing manual” in Q1 of 2014. So far over 75 copies were sold and this makes this my most successful self-publishing book to date!
- I answered every email send to info@libreplan.com and helped people using the application and discussed their wishes with them. This amounts to 294 separate questions that I answered. 29 of these were if LibrePlan could be installed on Windows (yes, that is possible but you have to figure it out all by yourself).
- I regularly cleaned the Q and A site where spammers keep trying to sell crap.
- I discussed wishes with over 50 individual companies.
- I traveled to France and did 5 training sessions there for one organisation. Great stuff!
- I contacted several Java programmers to be able to response to customer requests should they occur.
What did not happen?
- A new LibrePlan release.
You might ask yourself why? Now this is were the story becomes a little personal but I will tell you anyway. But if you are used to corporate marketing bla bla only I suggest you skip the next part and go straight to the “What will happen?” section as you are probably only interested in solid results. 🙂
I want to sh
are with you the reasons why there has not been a release yet. One thing is that I lost my day job 1st of January and I have been busy trying to find a new one. Being 50 years of age in a time of economic slum turned out not to bode well for this. Not even the fact that I am a volunteer fire fighter in my community makes any difference :-). I am not in the habit of torching places of work so, combined with the relatively optimistic economic growth forecasts I expect to find a job soon.
Another reason for the absence of a new release is that I have a very lovely stepdaughter. She loves to take a computer apart just for fun! Upon closer inspection of the picture you might see that she sits in a wheelchair. She was born 17 years ago with spina bifida and recently underwent here 43th surgery. Needless to say there is an extremely high level of care taking involved. Did I mention that we have a total of 5 kids to care for, two of which with disabilities? If you can read Dutch we have a website were we inform all members of the family about health issues and progress. Last June it became clear that keeping here living at home was no longer a reasonable option. So from October onwards she started living somewhere else and she visits us regulary. These recent events have had a tremendous impact on all our lives. It will take some time before the deep level of fatigue will subside but both my wife and I are also very optimistic in this regard.
What will happen?
Now this is an excellent question! What will happen? And when? Well, I found out the hard way that communicating solid deadlines is a sure thing to make people unhappy. What I can do is share with you my plans. You may even call it a roadmap. Here it is:
- Make a new release, most likely 1.4.1.
- Set up a stable build environment, most likely on openSuSE Build Service, where I can easily build packages for several distributions at once.
- Make a new release, most likely 1.5.0 where margins are introduced.
- Merge the existing Risk/Issue log code and finish it.
- Add email functionality to the program to inform users of changes.
- Add a pipeline page to show, well, err, the pipeline of projects.
- Add documents functionality to be able to add documents to a project.
- Add a GOTIK report. I know, GOTIK is a Dutch abbreviation meaning Money, Organisation, Time, Information and Quality. So it will probably be a MOTIQ report.
As you can see there are enough plans. Will they all happen? I don’t know, but I am sure as hell gonna try! When will they happen? As soon as I can. That is my promise to you.
Kind regards,
Jeroen Baten
P.S. Normally I do not accept replies to posts because I think there are enough other places on the Internet where people can vent. But this time I am curious about your thoughts. So tell me.