Handover announcement

[Owen B]

Hi all

I have some big news to share with you today.

As many of you have noticed, I've had less time to dedicate to SocketStream in recent months, causing me to become somewhat of a bottleneck to incoming pull requests and future developments.

After a great deal of thought about my future goals and the best outcome for existing users, I decided to ask my good friend Paul Jensen if he would like to take over the project. I'm very happy to announce he has accepted.

As many of you know, Paul's been involved in SocketStream from day one. We both spent a number of years working together at AOL using SocketStream to create some of the world's first 100% realtime web apps, a year or so before Meteor came along.

Paul not only knows the code well, he has a rare quality I value most: he cares. Deeply. About SocketStream, the people who use 0.3 today, and the future direction of the project.

I know one of his first tasks will be to improve the documentation and make it easier for others to contribute - something that's been long overdue. I'm also happy to announce that he won't be doing all this alone. Robert Hall (ArxPoetica), Davis Ford, Roman Minkin and several others have all expressed a desire to help out with development and documentation going forward. Thanks guys!

As for myself, working on an open source project just before Node.js took off like a rocket has been an incredible experience. I've had the chance to meet Ryan, Issac, Mikeal, Substack and Guillermo (my Internet heros) and the opportunity to travel the world and present at awesome conferences. Thanks especially to Adam and Henrik for inviting me to Realtime Conf (twice), Nuno for LXJS, Matthew for QConf, Sveinung for Oslo, Cian for Dublin, Andrew for LNUG, and Julien for Lyon. I have great memories of them all.

Over the last few months I've been experimenting with new programming languages and technologies outside of Node. I'm going to be using everything I've learnt so far to build something very new and different: a crazy-ambitious startup idea that's been burning inside of me for many years, even before SocketStream. The time has come to focus 100% on this and make it a reality. I'll be announcing more on my personal Twitter account (@temporalwave) in due course.

While I'll no longer be involved in the day-to-day running of SocketStream, I'll continue to contribute ideas, drop in on IRC and the Google Groups, provide advice when asked, and commit code every now and then - but as of today, this is now Paul's project and he's the boss.

With a new leader at the helm, and a great community of users producing awesome apps such as http://hollowdocumentary.com, http://bitjoy.org and http://vmux.co, I feel confident I'm leaving SocketStream in good hands with a bright future ahead.

Owen

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I've also posted this to https://gist.github.com/socketstream/6179434

[Gilbert B Garza]

Wow, big news. Here's hope to socketstream continuing on the path to being the best realtime library for node.

Gilbert

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[Robert Hall]

Great appreciation to Owen for leading such an awesome project. To the future! Cheers!

[Paul Jensen]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to offer my thoughts.

First off, I'd like to thank Owen for offering me the role of leading the SocketStream project. It's a great honour and I'm going to give it my best shot. I'd also like to thank him for the substantial amount of time and effort he has invested in the project. We're all indebted to him for helping us to build some amazing web applications.

What happens next

---

My immediate goals are: 

1 - Fix issues/bugs with SocketStream 0.3

SocketStream 0.3 is in production use, and therefore any bugs and issues relating to it shall be fixed over the coming weeks. Expect a 0.3.5 release very soon (within a week).

2 - Devise a plan for 0.4

SocketStream 0.4 is the next iteration on SocketStream. At this stage, it is not clear what work will need to be done to turn 0.4 into a release candidate. I will be talking to Owen to help forge a rough plan for the work that needs to be done, and to then get community input on the plan, refine it and then develop 0.4.

3 - Documentation

Though it exists, the documentation on SocketStream could be better. I've asked Robert Hall to take the lead on what will become the new documentation for SocketStream. He's done a fantastic job with making the site for the documentary film Hollow, and I believe that he can do the same here.

4 - Engage with the community

I'm going to be reaching out to contributors, plugin developers, and general users of SocketStream to ask for their thoughts on the project; what's good, what could be better, and what they would like to see happen. It's good to get the perspective of others, especially at this stage of the project.

For anyone wanting to get in touch with me, my email is paulb...@gmail.com. I'm also on Twitter (@paulbjensen), and Github (https://github.com/paulbjensen).

When SocketStream was launched, the reaction was incredible. Admittedly the project has never reached those dizzying heights since. Nevertheless, a community has remained who have built some great tools and apps on this framework, and who want to see the project grow. I'm committed to seeing that happen. 

Let's put SocketStream back on the map.

Paul