Yes, the rumours are true, I am leaving Spree Commerce. This makes me a git because there’s one and only one Community Manager at Spree, and so that void will need to be filled by someone else. Thankfully Jeff Dutil is going to step into my role as interim Community Manager for the time being.
I’m also a git for tricking you all:
Ryan Bigg is now a GitHubber! https://t.co/jYm8bKVV1z
— Ryan Bigg (@ryanbigg) July 21, 2014I’m not going to work for GitHub. I’m going to work at LIFX as a Ruby programmer there, starting August 4th. It was exceptionally lonely working in this Melbourne timezone mostly by myself, and I was getting complacent at Spree. I want a bigger challenge while I still have the time and energy for it.
LIFX seems like a perfect fit in regards to those things. I’ll be working with people in an office in Richmond (not far from where I currently work at Inspire9), and the work will be something different to the ecommerce work that I’ve been doing for 2.5 years. The Internet of Things is a really neat concept and I am really looking forward to working at LIFX.
I first worked with Spree when I worked with my old job building the ABC online store. I was also working on the Engines Guide at this point, so my interest around Rails engines was still quite intense.
Josh Adams pinged me about a discussion regarding namespaces on the spree user mailing list and I just had to reply. That week, Sean from Spree messaged me over IRC and asked if I wanted a job. A month later I started working there on the namespacing work and gradually took over the maintenance of the project from Sean and Brian while they worked on developing Spree Commerce as a business.
As a result of that, I’ve made over 3000 commits and posted 7,000 issue comments. Over two and a half years, that averages out to 3 commits per day and almost 8 comments. I’ve also posted 15,000 messages in the Spree IRC channel. I don’t know the email stats, but I would guess it falls within the same range. I apologise for all the spam.
I’m immensely proud of my work at Spree. It’s been an interesting challenge to work on building something as complex as an ecommerce platform and still keeping it neat and tidy in comparison to certain other ecommerce frameworks. I know the Spree team will keep up the great work that they’ve been doing on Wombat. The future of Spree is looking bright, and I wish them all the best.
Lastly, I’d like to thank Matt Allen from Lookahead Search for talking with me about this decision and other jobs. There’s quite a lot of jobs out there (for someone with my supposed talents) and it was hard making the decision between the places that I had talked to during my job hunt. Matt is extremely patient and a good friend and I appreciate his help a ton.