[Building Sakai] New Stuff

[Steven Githens]

Hello Sakai Dev,

The time has come for me to write one of these emails.  Next week will 
be the last week in my current role.  On February 20th I'll be starting 
a new chapter of my life in the Biostatistics department in the IU 
School of Medicine.  I'll be working closely with a doctor whose primary 
research interest is in reducing mother to child transmission of HIV and 
other diseases. As part of this I'll be working on OpenMRS, an open 
source medical record project, across a number of institutions and 
countries.  I'll probably spend a month a year or so in Kenya working 
with our colleagues there.

I'd like to thank everyone in the Sakai community I've worked with for 
the past 6 years, which have been some of the best of my life.  While 
I've always been an open source advocate, Sakai was the first project I 
really latched on to, and dived in to with everything I had.  I've 
learned an incredible amount about coding, testing, refactoring, 
tooling, and the entire software development ecosystem.  Even more so 
though, I'm happy to have developed such a number of great friendships 
in the community, and been surrounded by such great camaraderie.   We 
should never forgot how awesome our community is.

With that said, it's likely I may pop up again in the future, but 
starting sometime midweek next week I'll probably be going off the Sakai 
grid for a while, so that I can really dive into this new source code 
base with a fresh mind.

I do hope to continue to catch up with folks during my travels, and if 
you're ever in Indianapolis be sure to ping me!

Cheers to the Max!

~steve