Bookkeeping Announcement: I am now part of the NHibernate Committers Team!

I just got off the keyboard (kind of like getting off the phone, but more Internet-centric smile_wink ) with Fabio Maulo, the present project-lead for the NHibernate project and I’m quite pleased to announce that as of now I have been asked to join the NHibernate project team as a committer (oh, and also that I accepted his invitation too, of course).

New Role, Old Role, Same Role

My own involvement with NHibernate has, until now, been largely from the outside looking in.  Although a user of NHibernate since its 1.0.x days some time ago, I have never had occasion to spend much time looking at the source code for the framework.  That was work and focus that I left in the hands of other capable developers.

As readers of my blog, viewers of my Summer of NHibernate or the newer Autumn of Agile screencasts, or anyone who knows me otherwise can no-doubt attest, I am an avid proponent of NHibernate and consider it to be a significant component in my software engineering toolbelt.  Its not the right answer for everything to be sure, but today and for the foreseeable future its my default answer for data-access unless architecture or other constraints point me elsewhere during a project.

I have dedicated considerable personal and professional effort to the goal of increasing adoption of NHibernate by increasing awareness, provding improving (hopefully!) learning materials, and (as anyone who has either posted a comment to my blog or sent me an e-mail can attest to) answering as many questions for newcomers and experts alike as I can.  And this education and awareness effort on my part can be expected to continue.  But now I am also given the chance to participate in a completely new way.

New Collaborators, New Experiences

I’m delighted to have been invited by the current project team to contribute my experience, my insight, and my hard work directly to the project itself in the future.  This change represents a new role for me in re: NHibernate and one that I’m very excited to have been given the opportunity to explore.

The existing project team (as well as those that have come before them) represent some of what I consider to  be the best minds in the .NET development space with a set of software engineering values firmly in-line with my own principles and practices and I am looking very forward to the opportunity to work alongside these others on the NHibernate team.  We all grow by exposing our ideas, thoughts, and hard work to the scrutiny of others and I’m looking forward to all of that with this very talented and dedicated team of .NET developers.

Not the Newest Member smile_cry

The original title of this post was going to be "Say Hello to the Newest Member of the NHibernate Project Team" but before I could get around to writing this post, Fabio extended a subsequent invitation to Davy Brion (who also accepted) and by doing so he has unceremoniously usurped me as the ‘newest’ member of the team.  Damn.

While I’d love to have been able to keep the title for myself, IMHO Davy represents an excellent choice for an additional member of the team and I look forward to being able to work with him on the project going forward.  Sounds like Fabio is trolling the Blog-o-Sphere collecting as many NHibernate-lovers as he can to add to the project team and I predict that this can only lead to opportunities for us all to contribute to making an already great software project even greater.

I’m looking forward to digging in and getting my hands dirty; more to come on this over time (to be sure).  Mean time, cross your fingers for me that I don’t break the build on my first check-in smile_sarcastic.