The past few months have been difficult for many people in the United States, especially families navigating uncertainty about safety, stability, and belonging. My own blended family worked through some of those questions, and it led us to make a significant change.
Over the course of last year, my request to relocate to France while remaining in my role moved up and down the management chain at Red Hat for months without decision, ultimately ending in a denial. That process significantly delayed our plans, despite clear evidence of the risks to our family. At the beginning of this year, my wife and I moved forward by applying for long-stay visitor visas for France, a status that does not include work authorization.
During our in-person visa appointment in Seattle, a shooting involving CBP occurred just a few parking spaces from where we normally park for medical outpatient visits in Portland. It was covered internationally by the news and you may have read about it. Moments like that have a way of clarifying what matters and how urgently needed change can feel.
Our visas were approved quickly, for which we are grateful. We will spend the next year in France, where my wife has other Tibetan relatives. I look forward to immersing myself in the language and culture and to taking that responsibility seriously. Learning French in mid-life will be humbling, but I’m ready to give it my full focus.
This move also means a professional shift. For many years I have dedicated a significant amount of my time to maintaining and developing key components across the GNOME platform and its surrounding ecosystem. These projects are widely used, including in large Linux distributions and enterprise environments, and they depend on steady, ongoing care.
For many years I put in over forty hours every week to maintain and promote this stack. That level of unpaid or ad hoc effort is not something I can sustain, and my direct involvement going forward will be very limited. Given how widely this software is used in commercial and enterprise environments, long-term stewardship really needs to be backed by funded, dedicated work rather than free-time contributions.
If you or your organization depends on this software, now is a good time to get involved. Maybe by contributing engineering time, supporting other maintainers, or helping fund long-term sustainability.
The following is a short list of important modules where I am more or less the only active maintainer:
- GtkSourceView – foundation for editors across the GTK ecosystem
- Text Editor – GNOME’s core text editor
- Ptyxis – Default terminal on Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS/Alma/Rocky and others
- libspelling – Necessary bridge between GTK and enchant2 for spell check
- Sysprof – System-wide profiler that integrates Linux perf, Mesa, GTK, Pango, GLib, WebKit, Mutter and other statistics collectors
- Builder – GNOME’s flagship IDE
- template-glib – Template and small language runtime for a scriptable GObject Introspection syntax
- jsonrpc-glib – Provides JSONRPC communication with language servers
- libpeas – Plugin library providing C/C++/Rust, Lua, Python and JavaScript integration
- libdex – Futures, Fibre, and io_uring integration
- GOM – Data object binding between GObject and SQLite
- Manuals – Documentation reader for our development platform
- Foundry – Basic Builder as a command line program and shared library, used by Manuals and a future Builder (hopefully)
- d-spy – Introspect D-Bus connections
- libpanel – Provides IDE widgetry for complex GTK/libwaita applications
- libmks – Qemu mouse-keyboard-screen implementation with DMA-BUF integration for GTK
There are of course many other modules I contribute to, but these are the ones that need the most attention. I am committed to making the transition as smooth as possible and am happy to help onboard new contributors or teams that want to step up.
My next chapter is about focusing on family and building stability in our lives.
