Leaving W3C

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Renoir’s picture

Picture of me when I received a farewell gift from the W3C it was an autographied book signed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and a small trophy. Today (2020), my name appears in the W3C Team Alumni

Two years ago I announced I was joining W3C as a full-time staff to work on the WebPlatform project.

A detail I didn't share was that, like many of my W3C teammates, we are freelancers attached to one of the W3C host sites --- mine was with MIT. Like any contract, it has an ending date and by tomorrow, mine will be over.

I've spent two amazing years improving the WebPlatform.org website. It was really a dream that came true.

I've worked on many projects such as improving the server deployment strategy in which we can now basically shut down every component of the site and rebuild from scratch only using source-controlled configuration management scripts.

One of the best things of being part of W3C, even though I was working most of the time not in a team, was that I had a great opportunity to work in collaboration with my wonderful colleagues, and my (now former) manager Doug Schepers.

It's been a pleasure and a privilege to get to work with you all, and I won't forget the great moments, the conversations, the travels, the challenges. But my time is up now, I got to hand my [ssh] keys.

I hope our paths will cross again.

The W3C Team taken during TPAC 2013 in Shenzhen, China.

Photo credits: Richard Ishida (source: W3C team gallery).

In retrospective

Note: This was written on 2024-09-30

After the project stopped receiving funding in 2015, I voluntarily sustained (2015-2017) the infrastructure until the W3C Systems Team took over to permanently archive the site’s contents on W3C’s infrastructure. Fortunately for me the server infrastructure was "self-healing", each service would regularly check if its service was OK and knew how to start it back again, so it was pretty hands-off.

The last billed hours I made for the project was to host a static HTML version by having converted every pages, commits, deletes of every pages from MediaWiki into files as if they were commited into GitHub (GitHub webplatform/docs repository)