Some apologies, some reassurances

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm leaving IBM for a new opportunity at Laurentian University. Over the past year and a half a lot of my personal and professional effort has gone into the PHP community: contributing documentation, acting as the release lead for the ibm_db2 and PDO_INFORMIX extensions, giving conference sessions, and writing the occasional article.

When I made the decision to leave IBM, I also had to back down from some related commitments that I had made (formally and informally) to a few different people and groups. I want to apologize publically for letting you down, and hope that you'll forgive me:

• Open Source Content Management Summit (OSCMS): I was going to give a nice update on my database portability talk, focusing on the experiences I've had in trying to port Serendipity to run on DB2. Unfortunately, once I decided to leave IBM I couldn't justify sticking Big Blue with the travel and accomodations costs for flying out to Vancouver, so I had to back out of OSCMS with just a few weeks' notice. I felt really, really bad about that.
• Speaking of Serendipity, I still owe Gavin that patch for enabling DB2... I'll find the time one of these evenings!
• PHP Quebec: I was going to give a couple of talks at PHP Quebec in March, and was really looking forward to the conference given the trip reports and pictorial evidence from the last couple of years. However, it falls in the middle of the week. Worse, for me, it will be the third week at my new job, and while I expect Laurentian University to be a very understanding employer, my focus for the first few months has to be on learning the culture and challenges of my new position.
• An article here or there on DB2 and PHP: it made more sense to help get other IBMers involved and visible in the community, which meant handing off plans for an article to a different writer (and consequently blowing at least one publication schedule). I apologized in private for this at the time, but want to apologize publically as well. You know who you are...

Now, a few of you have wondered on IRC whether this means the end of my contributions to the PHP community... the answer is an emphatic *heck no*! First of all, my new position will give me some latitude in deciding upon the technologies we use to solve the problems we face, and the Library is already using PHP... so we're likely to continue to use it. And on a personal level, there are a number of projects that I want to continue to be involved with:

• PHP Data Objects (PDO): the basic documentation is in decent shape, but I have some catching up to do on new features, some examples to add, and some driver-specific documentation to add. I'll actually be in a better position to document it in my new role.
• PDO_ODBC: I noticed some significant regressions in the PDO_ODBC driver between the 5.1.0 and 5.1.1 releases that the 5.1.2 release did not address. Given that the ibm_db2 driver is written in DB2 CLI, a very close cousin to ODBC, I'm sure that with a few hours of investigation I can submit some patches for PDO_ODBC that will get the 5.1.3 release back on track. Oh yeah, and I have motivation to make sure this works because that book I co-authored contains a chapter on PDO_ODBC...
• Documentation in general: I still need some outlets for technical writing, so I plan to keep an eye on the phpdoc project and contribute to the tools and docs where it makes the most sense.

So I'll still be around; you just won't see me at the conferences this year, and I'll probably be even less productive over the next few months than normal as I adjust to the new role at the University. Oh, not to mention my new role as a father, which I am also expected to take on in a few months. But over time, I'm sure you'll hear more from me, and you'll start seeing submissions for conferences and articles grounded in my experiences at the library.