Annual Appraisal
I had my “Annual Appraisal” at work today. It didn't get off to the best of starts -I had been fire-fighting a server in a distant server-farm throughout the day, and completely forgot about it. The phone on my desk rang at 3:15, and I ran down to the conference room with the leftovers of my coffeecompletely unprepared.
While talking about the various projects I have worked on over the last year, I became increasingly aware that I was dumping on just about every product we typically work with (the Microsoft stack)I had to consciously stop myself more than once.
I also found myself talking about the various open source technologiesI have tinkered with away from work, and how they might open opportunities for us. While talking about WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and the rest of the common web content managementplatforms, I realised the appraisal had turned into a bizarre fight for hearts and minds; only I was trying to convert people that would have no say in the choice of platform. I was wasting my time.
I have something of a history with open source software.
Many moons ago I didn't like the direction my professional work was going in, so took it upon myself to learn the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). It's probably worth remembering that this was back before children, when I had this curious thing called “free time” outside of work. I built a blog platform, a web content management platform, and a social website for writers (I figured it would be easy because it only had to deal with text).
In the curious way that unplanned events unfold, the little writing website took over our home lives for a couple of yearsappearing in writing magazines, internet magazines, and eventually leading to a newsletter, mugs, t-shirts, and all manner of other junk. Our house became an unlikely internet publishing company.
Anyway! (I'm good at getting off-topic)Back in the daywhen I was sort of famous among my co-workers for being the open-source zealotthe “Linux guy”I had to visit the Microsoft campus. I had an irrational fear that as I passed over the marble seal beneath the huge glass doors into the atrium, a scene reminiscent of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade would play outwhere the Microsoft Sith Lords would sense an open source evangelist in their midst, and start chanting dark spells or something (have I mixed enough science fiction and fantasy cannons yet?).
Of course none of that happened. I just sat at a very large, very expensive conference room table, and watched a very long, very boring video about an accessibility product that a third party was trying to sell us. We didn't buy it.