The beer is about to get a lot colder

When Tim first returned to the UK from his time at Moodle HQ, the first thing he did ((Well, the first thing I knew about, anyway)) was to invite me to come to The Great British Beer Festival with him. Apparently i’d taunted him with reports of Real Ale whilst he was in Perth. Well.. it’s time for Tim to get his own back!

After seven years working at LUNS and nine years living in Lancaster, I’ve decided to have a change of scenery and i’m going to be leaving many great friends and colleagues behind to move to Moodle HQ in Perth, Australia. Needless to say, this was not an easy decision to make. (Although the weather like Lancaster demonstrated today could convince me otherwise!)

My involvement with Moodle started with LUNS and it has been a great journey. We were newcomers to the Moodle community with a small project to move a few keen high-schools onto supported hosting platform in 2005. My first post to moodle.org was asking the theme forums for advice on how to do multiple themes on a single codebase and the first patch I remember getting accepted was to help us solve that problem six months later: MDL-6784. Although the git history suggests my first fix was actually a horrible JS change which surprises me more than anyone!)) Today LUNS is one of the largest non-HQ code contributors to recent Moodle releases and have provided hundreds of thousands of people with access to Moodle through our various clients - primary school students[1], university lecturers[2], high school teachers, company employees and charity workers. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed that journey and the great people who have made it what it is.

I’m really looking forward to working for Moodle HQ! Despite being so close to Moodle as a developer, I continue to be amazed and motivated by how many people I can touch by working on Moodle. Friends from my days at school and university use Moodle as part of their job on a daily basis, my youngest sister is currently studying and supported with Moodle (unfortunately only at stage 1 of Martin’s pedagogical stages) and I meet more and more moodlers ever day! I’m hoping that my time working as external developer working on the other side of the world to Perth will be a great new perspective to add to the team.

I’ll be working for LUNS for a while yet, but it feels like a good opporunity to thank everyone i’ve worked with over the years at LUNS, clients and community members who accepted my patches. :) I’m touched by the kind post about my leaving. I expect to continue working with you if more indirectly at Moodle HQ. :)

Happy Moodling!

[1] Making their initial steps to learning how to use a computer [2] No comment