Birthdays are happening

doc/sphinx/phk/10goingon50.rst

+.. _phk_10goingon50:
+
+========================
+Varnish - 10 going on 50
+========================
+
+Ten years ago, Dag-Erling and I were busy hashing out the big lines
+of Varnish.
+
+Hashing out had started on a blackboard at University of Basel
+during the `EuroBSDcon 2005 <http://2005.eurobsdcon.org/>`_ conference,
+and had continued in email and IRC ever since.
+
+At some point in February 2006 Dag-Erling laid down the foundations of
+our Subversion and source tree.
+
+The earliest fragment which have survived the conversion to Git is
+subversion commit number 9::
+
+    commit 523166ad2dd3a65e3987f13bc54f571f98453976
+    Author: Dag Erling Smørgrav <des@des.no>
+    Date:   Wed Feb 22 14:31:39 2006 +0000
+    
+        Additional subdivisions.
+
+We consider this the official birth-certificate of the Varnish Cache
+FOSS project, and therefore we will celebrate the 10 year birthday
+of Varnish in a couple of weeks.
+
+We're not sure exactly how and where we will celebrate this, but
+follow Twitter user `@varnishcache <https://twitter.com/varnishcache>`_
+if you want don't want to miss the partying.
+
+--------
+VCLOCC1
+--------
+
+One part of the celebration, somehow, sometime, will be the "VCL
+Obfuscated Code Contest #1" in the same spirit as the `International
+Obfuscated C Code Contest <http://www.ioccc.org/>`_.
+
+True afficionados of Obfuscated Code will also appreciate this
+amazing `Obfuscated PL/1 <http://www.multicians.org/proc-proc.html>`_.
+
+The official VCLOCC1 contest rules are simple:
+
+* VCL code must work with Varnish 4.1.1
+* As many Varnishd instances as you'd like. 
+* No inline-C allowed
+* Any VMOD you want is OK
+* You get to choose the request(s) to send to Varnishd
+* If you need backends, they must be simulated by varnishd (4.1.1) instances.
+* *We* get to publish the winning entry on the Varnish project home-page.
+
+The *only* thing which counts is the amazing/funny/brilliant
+VCL code *you* write and what it does.  VMODs and backends are just
+scaffolding which the judges will ignore.
+
+We will announce the submission deadline one month ahead of time, but
+you are more than welcome to start already now.
+
+--------
+Releases
+--------
+
+Our 10 year aniversary was a good excuse to take stock and look at
+the way we work, and changes are and will be happening.
+
+Like any respectable FOSS project, the Varnish project has never been
+accused, or guilty, of releasing on the promised date.
+
+Not even close.
+
+With 4.1 not even close to close.
+
+Having been around that block a couple of times, (*cough* FreeBSD 5.0 *cough*)
+I think I know why and I have decided to put a stop to it.
+
+Come hell or high water [#f1]_, Varnish 5.0 will be released September
+15th 2016.
+
+And the next big release, whatever we call it, will be middle of
+march 2017, and until we change our mind, you can trust a major
+release of Varnish to happen every six months.
+
+Minor releases, typically bugfixes, will be released as need arise,
+and these should just be installable with no configuration changes.
+
+Sounds wonderful, doesn't it ?  Now you can plan your upgrades.
+
+But nothing comes free:  Until we are near September, we won't be able
+to tell you what Varnish 5 contains.
+
+We have plans and ideas for what *should* be there, and we will work
+to reach those milestones, but we will not hold the release for "just this
+one more feature" if they are not ready.
+
+If it is in on september 15th, it will be in the release, if not, it wont.
+
+And since the next release is guaranteed to come six months later,
+it's not a catastrophe to miss the deadline.
+
+So what's the problem and why is this draconian solution better ?
+
+Usually, when FOSS projects start, they are started by "devops",
+Varnish certainly did:  Dag-Erling ran a couple of sites
+with Varnish, as did Kristian, and obviously Anders and Aydun of
+VG did as well, so finding out if you improved or broke things
+during development didn't take long.
+
+But as a project grows, people gravitate from "devops" to "dev",
+and suddenly we have to ask somebody else to "please test -trunk"
+and these people have their own calendars, and are not sure why
+they should test, or even if they should test, much less what they
+should be looking for while they test, because they have not been
+part of the development process.
+
+In all honesty, going from Varnish1 to Varnish4 the amount of
+real-life testing our releases have received *before* being released
+has consistently dropped [#f2]_.
+
+So we're moving the testing on the other side of the release date,
+because the people who *can* live-test Varnish prefer to have a
+release to test.
+
+We'll run all the tests we can in our development environments and
+we'll beg and cajole people with real sites into testing also, but
+we won't wait for weeks and months for it to happen, like we did
+with the 4.1 release.
+
+All this obviously changes the dynamics of the project, and it we
+find out it is a disaster, we'll change our mind.
+
+But until then:  Two major releases a year, as clock-work, mid-september
+and mid-march.
+
+----------------
+Moving to github
+----------------
+
+We're also moving the project to github.  We're trying to find out
+a good way to preserve the old Trac contents, and once we've
+figured that out, we'll pull the handle on the transition.
+
+Trac is starting to creak in the joints and in particular we're
+sick and tired of defending it against spammers.  Moving to github
+makes that Somebody Elses Problem.
+
+We also want to overhaul the project home-page and try to get
+a/the wiki working better.
+
+We'll keep you posted about all this when and as it happens.
+
+--------------------------------------------
+We were hip before it was hip to be hipsters
+--------------------------------------------
+
+Moving to github also means moving into a different culture.
+
+Githubs statistics are neat, but whenever you start to measure
+something, it becomes a parameter for optimization and competition,
+and there are people out there who compete on github statistics.
+
+In one instance the "game" is simply to submit changes, no matter
+how trivial, to as many different projects as you can manage in
+order to claim that you "contribute to a lot of FOSS projects".
+
+There is a similar culture of "trophy hunting" amongst so-called
+"security-researchers" - who has most CVE's to their name?  It
+doesn't seem to matter to them how vacuous the charge or how
+theoretical the "vulnerability" is, a CVE is a CVE to them.
+
+I don't want to play that game.
+
+If you are a contributor to Varnish, you should already have the
+nice blue T-shirt and the mug to prove it.  (Thanks Varnish-Software!)
+
+If you merely stumble over a spelling mistake, you merely
+stumbled over a spelling mistake, and we will happily 
+correct it, and put your name in the commit message.
+
+But it takes a lot more that fixing a spelling mistake to
+become recognized as "a Varnish contributor".
+
+Yeah, we're old and boring.
+
+Speaking of which...
+
+----------------------------
+Where does 50 come into it ?
+----------------------------
+
+On january 20th I celebrated my 50 year birthday, and this was a
+much more serious affair than I had anticipated:  For the first
+time in my life I have received a basket with wine and flowers on
+my birthday.
+
+I also received books and music from certain Varnish users,
+much appreciated guys!
+
+Despite numerically growing older I will insist, until the day I
+die, that I'm a man of my best age.
+
+That doesn't mean I'm not changing.
+
+To be honest, being middle-aged sucks.
+
+Your body starts creaking and you get frustrated seeing people make
+mistakes you warned them against.
+
+But growing older also absolutely rulez, because your age allows
+you to appreciate that you live in a fantastic future with a lot
+of amazing changes - even if it will take a long time before
+progress goes too far.
+
+There does seem to be increasing tendency to want the kids of your
+lawn, but I think I can control that.
+
+But if not I hereby give them permission to steal my apples and
+yell back at me, because I've seen a lot of men, in particular in
+the technical world, grow into bitter old men who preface every
+utterance with "As *I* already said *MANY* years ago...", totally
+oblivious to how different the world has become, how wrong their
+diagnosis is and how utterly useless their advice is.
+
+I don't want to end up like that.
+
+From now on my basic assumption is that I'm an old ass who is part
+of the problem, and that being part of the solution is something I
+have to work hard for, rather than the other way around.
+
+In my case, the two primary physiological symptoms of middle age is
+that after 5-6 hours my eyes tire from focusing on the monitor and
+that my mental context-switching for big contexts is slower than
+it used to be.
+
+A couple of years ago I started taking "eye-breaks" after lunch.
+Get away from the screen, preferably outside where I could rest my
+eyes on stuff further away than 40cm, then later in the day
+come back and continue hacking.
+
+Going forward, this pattern will become more pronounced.  The amount
+of hours I work will be the same, but I will be splitting the workday
+into two halves.
+
+You can expect me to be at my keyboard morning (08-12-ish EU time)
+and evening (20-24-ish EU time) but I may be doing other stuff,
+away from the keyboard and screen, during the afternoon.
+
+Starting this year I have also changed my calendar.
+
+Rather than working on various projects and for various customers
+in increments of half days, I'm lumping things together in bigger
+units of days and weeks.
+
+Anybody who knows anything about process scheduling can see that
+this will increase throughput at the cost of latency.
+
+The major latency impact is that one of the middle weeks of each
+month I will not be doing Varnish.  On the other hand, all
+the weeks I do work on Varnish will now be full weeks.
+
+And with those small adjustments, the Varnish project and I are
+ready to tackle the next ten years.
+
+Let me conclude with a big THANK YOU! to all Contributors and Users
+of Varnish, for making the first 10 years more amazing than I ever
+thought FOSS development could be.
+
+Much Appreciated!
+
+*phk*
+
+.. rubric:: Footnotes
+
+.. [#f1] I've always wondered about that expression.  Is the assumption that
+   if *both* hell *and* high water arrives at the same time they will cancel
+   out ?
+
+.. [#f2] I've seriously considered if I should start a porn-site, just to
+   test Varnish, but the WAF of that idea was well below zero.

doc/sphinx/phk/index.rst

@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ You may or may not want to know what Poul-Henning thinks.
 .. toctree::
 	:maxdepth: 1
 
+	10goingon50.rst
 	brinch-hansens-arrows.rst
 	ssl_again.rst
 	persistent.rst