Looking back, going forward

May 11, a sunny day in my little corner of the world, was my last day at Xamarin. I’ve spent an amazing 9 months working on Mono for Android, but more than that, Xamarin was a continuation of my work in the Mono team that started in 2006 back at Novell. So, in a sense, this is an end of a cycle.

These past 6 years have been life-changing; I dove into professional open source development head first, worked with an amazing team, met a ton of great people, and learned and did so many things that sometimes it’s hard to believe it’s only been 6 years. Some projects were successful, some not so much, but nothing was ever routine or mundane. Moonlight was a particularly amazing experience, working with C#, C/C++ and JS inside a browser with bridges and refcounting and all sorts of crazy hacks to build an UI toolkit from scratch, and Mono for Android was a inspiring challenge that taught me more about mobile development than I thought possible. Impossible is not a word that the Mono team use much ;-)

A lot of people have been assuming that, since I’m leaving Xamarin, I’m going to leave Mono development altogether. Rest assured, that’s not going to happen. :-) There’s a lot of projects I want to support in the Mono world, and the Linux/Mono community definitely needs a bit of a pick-me-up, which is why I’ll be taking part in the Mono & Gnome Hackfest that’s going to happen in Boston June 26 to July 2.

In the meantime, I’ll be taking a bit of a break to recharge batteries and get ready for the new challenges ahead. It’s going to be an interesting year! :-D