Fare Well Pete

I can’t think of a better character to incarnate the open source spirit we aspire to within Sky Technology than Pete Mouland. And Pete will leave Sky next Thursday. He used to work with us in the Sales and Service department (SaS). Here he put a lot of energy behind the Global Toolkit, the first successful open source initiative at Sky.

Pete left SaS for Sky News before I joined. And that’s where this is brilliant: I shouldn’t have known him. Not with the problems Sky usually has with ‘silos’ Collaboration & Team Work. But he has never stopped contributing to the Global Toolkit. Beyond this project, his attitude probably ranks him among role models: always ready to pair and help, relentlessly improving his craft and regularly letting his peers learn from his experience. No surprise then that I got the honour to team with him on sky-tags. As a matter of fact, sky-tags is the Global Analytics Toolkit reloaded. It had to have Pete’s signature in its git log.

Among the stupendous legacy that he will leave behind, his last piece of work stands out. It’s the component-helper. I think here, Pete went meta. Instead of simply writing code that we can all reuse and improve, he wrote code so that we write code we can easily reuse and improve. If you’re into Javascript, check it out now. Pete is actively handing over his stuff and will happily take your questions up to his last beer at the Coach and Horses.

Pete paved the way: it has never been a better time to make a difference at Sky with code and team spirit. It doesn’t take much to join the fun: just pick an issue and have a crack at it¹. And no, you don’t have to be a WarL0rdz, a ninja or a rockstar but that the surest path to become one. Oh, and don’t ask for funding for supporting our open source projects, it’s like asking funding for your unit tests ;-) Just factor that into your estimates².

I did exactly that today, and this pull request is your farewell gift Pete. So long and thanks for all the fish!