[Dev] new OSAF engineer intro (myself)

[David McCusker]

Hi folks,

Today is my first day as an OSAF engineer, and my mission is to write
world class software that revolutionizes the way data is stored and
accessed by computer programs.  So I'll be doing a lot of work on the
Chandler storage system and future OSAF apps in pursuit of this goal.
I'm quite excited by this new position and happy to join the project.

I hope to cooperate with many folks in the design and implementation
of code in Python and C (and other languages as suitable) to get the
most pleasing and useful result for storage and app development for
folks working with OSAF source code, and for any useful spinoff tools
used with other projects and/or app environments.

I plan to be very open about what I'm doing and thinking, so other
folks participate in storage related work as fully as can be managed
(without everyone sitting in the same place and taking turns writing
specs and code in a round robin fest).  I'll make myself responsible
for the quality of the product, but I'll only be one contributor.

My personal weblog will contain a lot of thinking out loud and pointers
to prose I write about Chandler issues and related storage problems, so
you can see what I'm up to all the time, and make suggestions, or argue
for different ways of doing things.  Maybe this will help erase some of
a boundary between external community and core engineering -- I hope so.

I have a lot to learn, and learning it will be a lot of fun. :-)  Please
feel free to tell me where I ought to direct my attention to gather
the most useful clues about persistence and storage in the context
of Python development, even though I already have a queue of things to
study already.  I should make a web page enumerating all the links that
will help folks in the future boostrap themselves into more knowledge.

(Probably the mailing lists don't need to see individual suggestions
for Python related learning resources, so I'll summarize everything on
an evolving web page whose URL I'll cite later in list postings.  So
email suggestions to me alone, and assume I'll quote edited versions
of your email in web pages unless you ask me not to reprint your mail.)

We'll be working with ZODB and RDF, and many of you folks will still
know more about them than me, even after I get deeply involved with
using them in a Chandler context.  Please don't hesitate to straighten
me out as often as necessary (and even more often just to make sure).
I don't have an attitude about knowing more than other folks, and I
rarely bother with much face when getting along without fuss is easy.

Please help me make the OSAF code work well, with interfaces and docs
that make it easy to use, since that's the most important thing.  I'll
tend to publish my grasp of the system when I can to help other folks.

Sorry about the formal sounding introduction and announcement.  It
seemed polite to do this at least once, before delving straight into
informal interaction that might often seem cavalier in general.

--David McCusker

p.s. Did I mention I was excited? :-)