One year after

written on Friday, November 18, 2011

It has been a bit more than one year since I announced I was reducing my work hours to 4 days per week so that I would get one day to work on what I want to work on. One year after, it is time to look back how it went.

I was curious to find out how much money could be generated by asking for donations. To this end I wrote monthly wrap-ups, with the idea that people would be more motivated to donate if they knew what would be done. It started out reasonably well, but quickly slowed down. At some point I decided writing those wrap-ups was not worth the pain: They did not generate much, were getting tedious to write and made me look like I was begging for money when there are charities which are much more in need of money than me. I also experimented with Flattr. I like the idea behind Flattr and intend to continue using it.

Another project I worked on for a few months was a Qt book. Writing a book is a challenge I have been willing to take for a long time. A French editor was looking for an author to write a book on Qt, so I contacted them and we started to work together. It did not turn out that well unfortunately and I decided to abort the project for two reasons: the book was supposed to target Qt 5, but the lack of a firm release date made it impossible for me to sign myself for a date when I could hand out a final script. More importantly, the editor wanted the book to be written following a specific organization which did not fit with what I had in mind: after two dozen pages, writing no longer fun, and a book which is not pleasant to write cannot be pleasant to read, in my opinion.

In my last year post, I also mentioned a web-based project. The idea is to provide a place for parents to share amusing quotes from their children... I assume if you don't have kids it sounds a bit silly :) On the other hand, if you do have kids (and speak French) you should check out tropmignon.com! I didn't get as much as I expected done on it, because I decided to put tropmignon.com on hold when I started working on the Qt book. Now that the book project has been canceled I resumed working on the site. It still lacks important features like Facebook login or comments, but they will come. This project is also a nice way for me to brush up my dusty web development skills.

Finally I have been busy working on KDE this year and intend to continue doing so. Until 4.8 is out, I am concentrating on Gwenview: the QGraphicsView port was quite involved and there are quite a few rough areas I want to get polished before it can be considered good enough.

That's it for this year, we'll see how it feels in November 2012!