Welcome at Synodalsoft, Joy and Abdullah!

Saturday, August 31, 2024

The Synodalsoft team welcomes two new contributors, Joy and Abdullah. I updated our list of individual contributors.

They come from very different places: Joy lives in Montevideo, 6 hours after Tallinn time zone, and Abdullah lives in Melbourne, 7 hours before Tallinn. Lino is extending to the ends of the world ;-)

They joined Synodalsoft at an interesting moment of our history.

When Joy contacted me, on March 4, I was actually in hospital, recovering from an accident where I broke my hip. This accident forced me to step back from my social volunteer engagements for the next months. As a religious person I constantly talk with God (some call it “praying”), so I asked him “What does that mean? What are you telling me through this?” and he answered in an unusually clear way: “Luc, it’s more than 20 years that you are trying to explain to church people in Estonia how they should do their work. They don’t want to hear you. Leave them in peace. Your vocation is Lino. Stop wasting your time with useless things.”

Note that “Lino” and “Synodalsoft” are synonym here. Synodalsoft is the team, Lino is our flagship product. I registered the synodalsoft.net domain name because the idea behind Lino is bigger than a single software product. Synodalsoft is about how software should ideally be developed, it is the name I suggest for the foundation to create if the project becomes bigger than Rumma & Ko can handle.

I had not yet fully recovered from my hip surgery when another frightening thing happened: Sharif, our second core developer, disappeared. He left his wife to visit a friend, and hasn’t answered his phone since then. This was more than three months ago and we still have no news about him. (Details in my blog.)

During the first weeks I was under shock and considered abandoning Lino if Sharif doesn’t come back. He had become like a son to me after 3 years of working together. But despite the catastrophic human aspect of this story, I started to realize that Lino continues to live, and that I will continue to develop it. Lino has always been developing slowly. Slow development is actually one of its strengths. For the first time in my life I seriously went down into the React front end. This part of Lino is quite different from the rest of Lino, most of it is written in Javascript. It had been written by Tonis and Hamza, and I never had to get my hands dirty with it. Because Sharif took over their job and was better than me at it.

Joy and Abdullah will remain volunteer contributors because I don’t plan to build up a third team of paid workers. I am now 56 years old and if you want Synodalsoft to continue when I will be gone, you can count on my help, but don’t ask me to be the motor.