Vanitas

Modern life is rapidly evolving and this is very present in the IT business. You can see it in the changes in the hardware (who is still using VHS tapes, non-smartphone mobile phones, Compact Discs etc.?), but also in software frameworks, popular open source libraries etc. being used.

This Tech Vanitas is e.g. nicely illustrated by Jeannette May, the key visual of this post is taken from her gallery. I myself have contributed in open source projects in the past. In my time in academic research I was …

… a major contributor for the conference organizer webapp named Corga, in my time at IBM Websphere Portal I have provided some plugins for improving the event matching between portlets as catalog shipment and in my time at businessmart I have delivered a page definition module for OpenCms just to name some. All of the projects have more or less come to an end as soon as I have moved on in my professional career.

Nevertheless I do believe they have been of considerable value to my employer as well as to others at that time. There’s not only a dedicated time frame for things like that, it is also a matter of achieving a critical mass of contributors, users and maintainers for an open source project to survive over time, as I guess is common knowledge. Nevertheless, you only know that when looking back, not at the time you are getting involved, I suppose.

Actually, I am currently considering to migrate Corga to the latest spec versions (Java 17 etc.) and release this maintenance version. Perhaps I will even provide the app as a docker image on dockerhub to make the operating experience smoother. Let’s see….