Putting my hat in the ring for Squeak Leadership Team 2009

Feb 19, 2009 at 6:01 PM
1 comment

In trying to recap this past year, my first year of being back into the Smalltalk world, I googled "randal schwartz squeak", and saw:

Results 1 - 10 of about 5,910 for (randal OR randall) schwartz squeak.

I think about 5700 of those pages didn't exist a year ago. Here's the highlights:

Created my blog methodsandmessages.vox.com to publish squeak news and observations
Demonstrated Squeak and Scratch on the "Lab with Leo" show, hosted by Leo Laporte and distributed in Canada and Australia
Had both Avi Bryant and Dan Ingalls on FLOSS Weekly, my weekly podcast with an audience of about 25,000 or so. Squeak was mentioned once or twice. :)
Managed to sneak a mention of Smalltalk and Squeak into just about every other episode of FLOSS Weekly
Got Leo Laporte thinking about a weekly Seaside tutorial video podcast, in which we would run through my courseware to teach him (and the audience, by proxy) how Seaside and Squeak works
Provided the weekly Squeak News segment for James Robertson's Industry Misinterpretations podcast, broading the continued presence and currency of Squeak throughout the Smalltalk community
In my role as Leadership Team member, coordinated the cutover of the squeak.org to Aida, and am currently sheparding the Squeak 4.0 relicense effort
Established the meme "the year of Smalltalk" in my blog, which has been used as a unifying rallying cry to help the resurgence in 2008
Got the Brazillian FISL conference interested enough in Smalltalk from my 2008 presentation that they created an entire Smalltalk/Squeak miniconf for 2009 (which I'm just now putting out the CFP for, by the way)
Got interviewed by InfoQ about the Smalltalk Comeback, where I mentioned Squeak prominently
Got interviewed by WebDevRadio about Seaside, mentioning Squeak at least a few times
Got interviewed by Reflective Surface, a blog about Ruby-ish things about Seaside and Squeak
Produced a keynote talk at STIC's Smalltalk Solutions 2008, which included my Seaside talk and a Persistence talk, both incorporating many mentions of Squeak
Gave a three-hour lecture at OSCON 2008 on Smalltalk and Seaside, using Squeak as the primary demonstration tool
Produced a few videos for Vimeo on how to use Squeak, and got a few other people using Vimeo for hosting, including creating a Squeak group there
Created a "Seaside Bootcamp" class, to be delivered by BigNerdRanch in Germany in a few months
Promoted Squeak via watching various twitter and blog messages for mentions of Smalltalk, Seaside, and Squeak
Answered many questions on squeak-dev, beginners, and seaside mailing lists.
Hung out in the #squeak, #seaside, and ##smalltalk channels on freenode, and the #smalltalk channel on Parcplace, answering questions and occasionally annoying the other locals
Gave the "Seaside: your next web framework" advocacy presentation at many companies and conferences, which features Squeak as one of the many Smalltalk implementations that runs Seaside
Presented a talk on Squeak GLORP at the PostgreSQL day in Portland
Got interviewed by GeekCred podcast for a general biography, but managed to get Squeak mentioned in there once or twice
Answered Smalltalk and Squeak-related questions on Stack Overflow

Ok, I'll stop there. I'm sure there's three important things I'm leaving out, and 20 trivial things.

Looking back at this list, all I can say is... "oops, I set the bar too high for my second year". :)

But seriously, I have dedicated, and continue to dedicate, my time and energy and attention and skills to promoting Squeak as the basis for a sane programming environment to make it easier for all of us to get things done, and cooperate and collaborate in an open-source way to avoid repeating ourselves.

I would be honored to serve a second term on the Leadership Team, to help complete the relicensing effort, and work with all parties to figure out what Squeak 5.0 needs to be. We're at an interesting point in Squeak's development (think: "the teenage years"), and continuity with the past and a vision for the future are cruicial.

Please consider me as you cast your ballot.