Re: Old programmers do fade away

[David Smiley <ds...@apache.org>]

I'm *really* sad to see you stepping away.  You're a legend in
our community, especially with your tireless help to our users.  And you're
truly a pleasure to work with and to simply know.

40 years is enough indeed... but... I'll make a last ditch selfish request
to help me come to grips with you leaving:  consider "fading away"
(gradually) instead of more suddenly.  I sympathize with the difficulty in
keeping up with development but you needn't try to -- just restrict your
attention to a limited area of the code or topically.  This suggestion is
directed at not just you but really at anyone who wants to contribute.
This is a huge project that is probably overwhelming to newcomers.  I use a
keyword based email filter technique for this.  Maybe you might consider
helping with the Solr TLP migration?  That's more social and less code
hacking.  I hope this paragraph comes off respectfully -- it's ultimately
your choice to enjoy your time as you wish.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on retirement and further interests. It is
thought provoking to consider what to do at retirement age.  So many
possibilities.

Oh and finally, thanks for this email to announce your intentions.  It's
rather rare to get this; others fade away without an announcement and so
there is no public reflection on the departure of the individual.  I could
list some but I don't want to distract from your message.

Ryan: that squirrel water shooter video at PyCon was fantastic; thanks for
sharing!

~ David Smiley
Apache Lucene/Solr Search Developer
http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwsmiley


On Wed, Dec 30, 2020 at 9:09 AM Erick Erickson <er...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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.erickson@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
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