40 years is enough. OK, it's only been 39 1/2 years. Dear Lord, has it really been that long? Programming's been fun, I've gotten to solve puzzles every day. The art and science of programming has changed over that time. Let me tell you about the joys of debugging with a Z80 stack emulator that required that you to look on the stack for variables and trace function calls by knowing how to follow frame pointers. Oh the tedium! Oh the (lack of) speed! Not to mention that 64K of memory was all you had to work with. I had a co-worker who could predict the number of bytes by which the program would shrink based on extracting common code to functions. The "good old days"...weren't...
I'd been thinking that I'd treat Lucene/Solr as a hobby, doing occasional work on it when I was bored over long winter nights. I've discovered, though, that I've been increasingly reluctant to crack open the code. I guess that after this much time, I'm ready to hang up my spurs. One major factor is the realization that there's so much going on with Lucene/Solr that simply being aware of the changes, much less trying to really understand them, isn't something I can do casually. I bought a welder and find myself more interested in playing with that than programming. Wait until you see the squirrel-proof garden enclosure I'm building with it. If my initial plan doesn't work, next up is an electric fence along the top. The laser-sighted automatic machine gun emplacement will take more planning...Ahhh, probably won't be able to get a permit from the township for that though. Do you think the police would notice? Perhaps I should add that the local police station is two blocks away and in the line of fire. But an infrared laser powerful enough to "pre-cook" them wouldn't be as obvious would it? Why am I so fixated on squirrels? One of the joys of gardening is fresh tomatoes rather than those red things they sell in the store. The squirrels ATE EVERY ONE OF MY TOMATOES WHILE THEY WERE STILL GREEN LAST YEAR! And the melons. In the words of B. Bunny: "Of course you realize this means war" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XNr-BQgpd0)... Then there's working in the garden and landscaping, the desk I want to build for my wife, travel as soon as I can, maybe seeing if some sailboats need crew...you get the idea. It's been a privilege to work with this group, you're some of the best and brightest. Many thanks to all who've generously given me their time and guidance. It's been a constant source of amazement to me how willing people are to take time out of their own life and work to help me when I've had questions. I owe a lot of people beers ;) I'll be stopping my list subscriptions, Slack channels (dm me if you need something), un-assigning any JIRAs and that kind of thing over the next while. If anyone's interested in taking over the BadApple report, let me know and I can put the code up somewhere. It takes about 10 minutes to do each week. I won't disappear entirely, things like the code-reformatting effort are nicely self-contained for instance and something I can to casually. My e-mail address if you need to get in touch with me is: "erick.erick...@gmail.com". There's a correlation between gmail addresses that are just a name with no numbers and a person's age... A co-worker came over to my desk in pre-historical times and said "there's this new mail service you might want to sign up for"... Like I said, 40 years is enough. Best to all, Erick --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@lucene.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@lucene.apache.org
