I noticed just now that I've finally hit the 800 'thanks' mark here on TMO, and, as well as saying thanks for the thanks, I thought it'd be nice to do a little reflection on why I'm here, what I've done, and what I'm doing - a little soul searching, if you will.

Where I've come from
My background before Maemo was not that of a mobile enthusiast. Quite the opposite. My phone was ancient, I never really paid attention to tech news, and I was quite happy. I was still an open source hacker then, though: amongst many other things, I used to be a developer on what I'd nowdays say were quite boring things like InspIRCd, an internet relay chat server.

Gradually, my interests shifted towards other things - amongst many others, I started to experiment with Qt.

Some years ago, that started to change a little, though, as I was introduced to Maemo by Stskeeps (who I've known for many years now). This was (I think) around the time of the n800s, possibly n810s. It caught my interest a little, but I didn't want "yet another device", so I drifted away off onto other things again for a while. Until August, when the n900 was released...

...when I preordered ASAP and proceeded to go insane with geek lust until I finally got my device early December.

Arrival
So, I got my device, I started experimenting, playing, and loving it. PyQt, PySide, Python, C++, I played with them all a bit, and I still do whenever I get the chance now - increasingly often releasing the stuff I toy with too. (http://github.com/rburchell/). Sooner rather than later I started to get increasingly interested in the wider Maemo community - and the Qt community (since I was already there) and started helping out with random things for random people, e.g. application developers when I could.

Partly as a result of my changed interests, I changed jobs after some months, to start working in the area of mobile devices for a great company with some great people, at Collabora.


Today
I won't say I'm perfect, but I'd say I've helped out a fair bit and I'm aiming to do more moving towards the future, through things like the MeeGo developer engagement work - i.e. helping other developers, as well as writing lots of random bits and pieces of code which have proven useful to myself and hopefully many others.

I plan to keep getting involved, to keep helping others, and to keep spreading the knowledge I have - for both my own enjoyment, and so that others can help spread that further.

The Future
I plan to continue my development work, my evangelism and education work, and I'm really looking forward to getting my teeth into the MeeGo handset UX release - hopefully not long to wait on that one. I have grown to love Maemo, MeeGo - both the people and the ecosystem.

Thanks for listening. I hope I haven't bored you all with my brief history and braindump.

... So, what's your story?