Mediratta.net

I’m incredibly happy to say that Gallery 2.2 has been released. In May Gallery will be seven years old which makes it by far the longest amount of time that I’ve been involved in any software project. I’ve seen it grown from the tiniest seed to a mighty oak in that time and the process has never ceased to amaze me. I’ve learned more about leadership, product development engineering practices from working on Gallery than from any paying job I’ve ever had. And the lessons that I’ve learned from Gallery have helped me greatly with my day job. The 2.2 release is the culmination of 11 months of planning, coding and testing.

Over the years I’ve managed to divest more and more authority and responsibility for the project and I’m happy and proud to say that while I was still a key player in this release, I was not the primary. The project has evolved to the point where the release process was a smooth team effort with small and large contributions from many people, not just a notable few. That’s not to say that there weren’t some amazing efforts made by a heroic few, but it wouldn’t be fair for me to highlight anybody because there were so many contributors to this success. It’s easy to look to the developers as the folks who write the code, but we also had tons of help from the folks who did support in the forums and on irc, all the people who tested the code on an almost daily basis, the horde of localizers who helped us get 10 localizations to the 100% mark (which means translating over 4200 words and phrases!), and our loyal and patient users who waited and waited and waited for us to be done.

It takes a village to raise a child. Thankfully, we have a big village now

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 17th, 2007 at 5:41 pm and is filed under Gallery. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.