It's well past time that I admitted something to myself: I am no longer actively maintaining any of my personal open-source projects.

As I was staring at my inbox this morning, noticing that it was full of github issue reports and thinking "I should really make time to respond to those" and then feeling ashamed that some are now several months old, I came to a surprising realisation – it's not that I can't make time to maintain those projects these days, it's that I no longer want to. I'm not "busy with family stuff" like I've been in the habit of telling myself, and I won't "get to that sometime soon". I'm getting my software fix on the job and I'm spending my personal time on other things, and I'm surprised to find myself OK with that.

It's been two months since I posted Passionate Developer seeks Dream Job, and I've been overwhelmed by the positive response it has generated - lots of well wishes, kind words, advice, and several really interesting opportunities. Even better, I'm happy to announce that the story has a happy ending.

The short version: I started today with Mozilla, working as a contractor with the Services team. It's been quite a ride to get here, so read on if you're interested in the long-version debrief.

I need something new in my career.

Don't get me wrong. I love what I do and I've no intention of abandoning the tech scene to, say, start an emu farm. But the current combination of work, family and life in general is starting to wear us all down. It's time for a change.

And frankly, if you're going to make a change, you might as well make it the absolute best one you can. So for the duration of this post I'm going to try something rather difficult – I'm going to switch off my usual unassuming, undemanding nature and give myself permission to be greedy. What's my dream job? My serious, no-holds-barred, anything-is-possible dream job. Hopefully I don't come off sounding like an arrogant jerk.

Because I need to know: does it exist, and do I have what it takes to land it?

Following up on the previous post about my newly ergonomic office, it's about time I shared all the details of my spiffy new chair. I've had it in heavy use for over a month now so I figure I can give a fair and unbiased opinion.

The short story: it's the Steelcase Leap Chair and it is made from pure awesomeness.

Now, the obvious choice for a programmer's office chair would have been that eternal symbol of dot-com-era excess, the Herman-Miller Aeron. Based solely on the hype the Aeron has generated online, any self-respecting chair-hunting geek owes it to themselves to track one down and try it out. I managed to find some in-stock at Living Edge in Richmond, and having tried it out, fiddled with all the knobs and rolled it around the showroom floor, I have to say: Meh. I just don't get the hype. Sure, it's nicer than my old $60 chair from Officeworks, but at just shy of fifteen hundred bucks I was expecting a lot more. read more >>

I've been sitting on this news for a few weeks now, while I got all the final preparations taken care of. I sent it off to the binders yesterday so I guess I can come clean: my PhD thesis has been accepted, and I'll soon be officially known as "Dr Kelly". Has a nice ring to it, don't you think? :-)

A special thanks to Adrian for being a great supervisor over the past four years, it's been a very challenging and rewarding experience and I enjoyed the process immensely. I've updated the page on my research with a PDF version of Asynchronous Multi-Agent Reasoning in the Situation Calculus. Hopefully I've found and updated all the other sections that said "my thesis is currently under examination" – please let me know if you spot any more. read more >>

Since I am now spending the vast majority of my time working out of the home office, I decided to invest a little cash in taking care of two of a programmer's most valuable assets – my wrists and back. I've been using my new acquisitions for a few weeks now so it's about time I reported on the experience. First up: the Goldtouch Ergonomic Desktop Solution featuring this keyboard and this mouse.