Hi all,

As I wrote in my previous short blog, I’d write up a longer post about what’s happening. As you may have noticed, my regular builds came to a halt. This was simply due to me being transferred to a project with the usual hush-hush tag on it. Also, this project was very demanding. I loved to do it: it was (and probably still is) technically challenging, had to do with cool technology and the direct collegues were great to work with. That was January, 2010, at Cybercom Plenware Oy.

Because the project was very intense: high communication demands, lots of code to work with: own code, numerous dependencies, and a constant changing development environment, almost weekly travels, and at some point, being scrummaster, I found it very hard to properly concentrate on anything else but my family after working hours. So unfortunately I let my blog linger, and all other work I had wanted to do.

Then came April. Talks with several people. Talking with the better half of me. And finally on April the 30th I resigned from my job – even though it was a great place and position to work in. With the possibilities offered and all the talking, I felt now was the right moment to do so. The right moment to make the decision to become my own boss.

So, a months worth of resignation time started – with no less work to do. Still so many interesting and more or less exciting things in the pipeline that I just couldn’t leave right away. And to be honest, I think it was the right think to do: to complete the tasks still open, to do My Thing one more time for Cybercom Plenware and the project. And I think that I managed to do so.

Meet Mr. Nathan Letwory, entrepreneur. Or whatever those beasts are called. I’ve now worked for a few weeks already as my own boss, and I must say I like it very much. In the morning I wake and, what do you know, I’m at the office already!

I am now active in a RealXtend, working on the Naali viewer. This will take right now most of my time. But I have also activated again in Blender development – started with updating some overdue libraries in lib/windows and lib/win64 modules. Furthermore I’ve taken some bug reports and patches (like the data and installation paths patch by Matt Ebb) under my looking glass to work on in the coming time. I hope to be useful for the upcoming Blender 2.5 Beta release (right now targetted for the end of this month). I’ve also offered Ton to assist him with Blender Conference 2010 organisation, so I’ll be there too – at last, it has been too long.

Of course, there’s the other projects I’ll be working on, and have been working on and off for the past two weeks: blenderstorm.org, updates to blender-fi.org (working on a competition module for organising contests and tournaments – and integration between the different parts that we have there), some work for Daniel Salazar (you’ll see, you’ll see) and much more.

As you can see, enough to do for this year: both paid work and volunteering work. I hope to be in touch with more people who need contracted work to be done, so please contact me if you read this and you think you might need me I’ll be looking as much as possible for work related to Blender and Open Source.

Looking at my previous posts with testing builds published on Graphicall.org, I see that during my 4 month inactivity there have been a whopping 3100+ commits! Way to go! When I’ve got more of the libs updated I’ll be posting again a newer testing build.

Now I’ll have to get back to work. I hope readers now know more about what has happened and what will happen in the (near) future.

/Nathan