[dev] Retirement

[Jon Parise]

I've been thinking about this for a while now, and I've decided that
it's time for me to officially retire from the project.  I'm sure many
of you have little idea who I even am other than the guy who originally
set up your horde.org accounts, so that's probably pretty telling unto
itself.

The old-timers here have witnessed the decline in my activity over the
last few years, and these days I barely have the time to responsibly
administer the horde.org servers.  Thanks to all of you who have
picked up my slack there!

I go back a pretty long way with the project.  I first became involved
with IMP back in 1998 (there was no Horde back then) while a freshman
in college when I started added NNTP functionality for RIT.  My job as
a student systems programmer at RIT allowed me to spend significant
time working with, and supporting, what was to become the Horde
Framework.

While in graduate school at CMU, I continued to remain involved with
Horde, but I was also spending a good deal of time on PEAR and PHP
itself.  It was during this period when I worked on a few PHP books,
such as "Professional PHP4 Programming".  I also spoke (with Chuck) at
a number of PHP conferences, preaching the virtues of Horde.

Since leaving academia three years ago, I've been working fulltime as
a software engineer for Electronic Arts.  My career path has taken me
pretty far away from web development, and I honestly find keeping up
with the latest technologies and standards quite difficult because of
it.

I've taken you on a little walk through the past eight years of my
life with a purpose, of course, and it wasn't to inflate my ego. =)

The Horde Project has meant a lot to me, both personally and
professionally.  It has given me a platform to experiment as a
software engineer, an application designer, a customer service
representative, and a lecturer.  This project's strong engineering
principles, coupled with its user-centric goals, have taught me more
about designing, building, and managing software than all of my
academic experience combined.

And this email wouldn't be complete without a very warm thank you to
the other Horde developers, most especially Chuck and Jan, with whom
I've had the pleasure of working for a number of years.  The project
owes a great deal to both of them, and I truly never doubted that
Chuck's enthusiam for what he's built would outlast my own.

And on a final note, I'm not completely disappearing.  I still intend
to remain active in the PHP community, where I maintain a number of
PEAR and PECL packages (many of which stem from, and continue to be
used by, Horde), and I'll still receive email at this address for at
least the near future.

Thanks very much, one and all!

-- 
Jon Parise (jon of horde.org) :: The Horde Project (http://horde.org/)