I just got off the keyboard (kind of like getting off the phone, but more Internet-centric ) 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 
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 .
Hello Steve and everyone
Just one word to say : congratulation ! It’s very cool ๐
oops… didn’t mean to ruin the title of your post :p
i’m looking forward to working with you as well ๐
I have a “killing question” ๐
With this new challenge, do you think you will be as objective as before ? ๐
@Kris-I:
Oh, yes, certainly. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not the least-bit opinionated about NHibernate ๐
Actually, I rather imagine that if anything I will be HARDER on the software than I may have been in the past. For better or for worse, I often reserve the harshest criticism for my own work and the work of things that I am involved in, so we’ll see how it goes.
Wow two .NET geeks being a part of a NHibernate.
Take that Entity Framework guys! ๐
@Prajwal:
Right, now its the NHibernate team + two more of us against all of Redmond. EF doesn’t stand a chance ๐
Seriously however, I actually think that if you look at posts like this ( http://blogs.msdn.com/efdesign/archive/2008/11/20/n-tier-improvements-for-entity-framework.aspx ) on where EF is headed to ‘address’ some of the ‘concerns’ of parts of the community combined with posts like this ( http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2008/11/22/the-nhibernate-community.aspx ) that show an increasing interest in NHibernate we can start to see how Microsoft’s entry into the O/RM space (despite repeated assurances that EF is somehow ‘more than an O/RM tool’ –whatever that means!) is actually leading to exactly what one could hope for here: an increased awareness among .NET developers in general as to what an O/RM even is and why they might want to use one.
The effect of this is that as people start to try to implement ‘real world’ applications atop EF a significant subset of them will bump into its limitations and instead of reverting to datasets will instead go looking for other implementations of similar technologies and in the process ‘discover’ things like NHibernate.
This can only be considered GOOD for NHibernate if we assume one of its goals is increasing its adoption (which I am not 100% certain is necessarily a goal). Just as Microsoft’s providing UNITY as an IoC container (albein only in a Patterns+Practices release rather than as part of the framework) has increased people’s general awareness of what an IoC container is and why they might want to use one, we are seeing a similar pattern in the O/RM space.
Will be interesting to see what happens with all of this, to be sure.
Congratulation Steve, its great to here about this.
Congratulation Steve. Its nice to know that NHibernate will have more GOOD commiters and the project continue its chalenge.
[…] Unhandled Exceptions ยป Blog Archive ยป Bookkeeping Announcement: I …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. … […]
congratulation steve ! i’m very happy to hear this..
Congratulations Steve!
Contratulations Steve!
Now that you are an NHibernate committer, surely you will work hard at improving NHibernate support for SProcs and functions ๐
If I remember correctly from lesson 10 of Summer of NHibernate, you weren’t all that impressed with the SProc support in NHibernate, even though it has been improving from earlier versions. I can’t wait for you to “supply a patch” ๐