Recognition

What keeps me doing things in my life are primarily two factors: Money and recognition. Not necessarily in that order.

In my job, I’m being paid to do what I do but I couldn’t ever be satisfied with just that. What really thrills me is being recognised for the professional I am. Receiving an email from a customer that simply said “Thank you. You’re one of the few persons I can always rely on.” made my day. I don’t get that from receiving my pay-cheque.

In my private life, I’m mostly a father, a husband and, last but not least, a guy who loves to work on Linux. A machine that just works is a boring machine. Thus, I really love working on Exherbo.

Working on Exherbo allows me to do and try everything, make things work exactly the way I want them to, give back to the FOSS community – and being recognised for the professional I am. 🙂

Recognition, thus, is very important for me. Now, Bryan “kloeri” Østergaard, has decided to remove Exherbo’s “Developers” page which lists all the core developers in favour of a simple list of all contributors ever.

This in itself is fine with me. What I really don’t like about it is the fact, that those of us who do most of the work on Exherbo will be buried somewhere in that rather huge list (after all, Exherbo currently has about 95 contributors).

I have Exherbo in my CV as well but am I supposed to send recruiters to a list of everyone and their dog and find me in there with no indication of my level of involvement?

As much of a trifle this may look, it annoys me and so I’m now using gitstats to create statistics and a list of authors myself. It’s not hosted on exherbo.org (linked from our “Resources” page, though) but on my own server:

http://www.mailstation.de/egitstats/

I’m going to add a few more graphs and stuff over time (like changes per package directory, category, etc.).

If you have any suggestions (preferredly upstream-able ones), please let me know.

I am and have been working on quite a few F/OSS projects:
  • Exherbo (Nick: Philantrop)
  • Gentoo (Nick: Philantrop)
  • Calibre plugin iOS reader applications
  • Calibre plugin Marvin XD
  • chroot-manager
  • stuff on github
  • Lots of other projects
  • If you like my work, feel free to donate. 🙂