I'm Handing off Render Engine

If you hear anything from me in the next year it will be that my focus will be on doing new things! But before I do that I need to make something official.

I made Render Engine at a time in Python when there only felt like there was only one potential choice for a Static Site generator using Python.

Sadly, I don't think that the options have grown that much, but the number of people working on Render Engine has. We've grown to a cadre of contributors and one new maintainer. That maintainer is Dan Shernicoff.

I'm happy to announce that after over 18 months of regular contribution and countless excellent decisions. I've made the decision to make Dan the primary maintainer and remove myself as an owner of the Render Engine org.

Why do this now

Honestly, this feels overdue. At this point Dan knows the codebase better than I do. I have learned so much from Dan's leadership on the project and his (many more than my) years of experience as a software engineer.

I also want to point out that this wasn't something Dan requested. It has become clear that I have many things in my life that are important and so few of them that I can hand to others to maintain. This was one that felt easy to do, which lets me know it's the obvious right choice.

Why am I telling you this since you likely don't use Render Engine

Well a small part of me hopes that you will consider using it if you want a static site generator with lots of thought and consideration. Render engine is incredibly flexible and customizable, and I've used it now for almost a decade to support personal sites, community sites, documentation, and even some commercial sites.

Putting Dan in charge now means that you have more experience behind the decision making which is more important than ever when so many of the changes are made by AI with little to no thought in WHY instead of HOW.

What does that mean for me

I plan to be as involved as Dan will have me but that is his decision to make. Based on our conversations, I expect my involvement to be somewhat less but not zero. I want to make sure that Dan has the ability to make the decisions he feels are correct and I don't want to be in the way of them.

I'll tackle issues and be a part of the conversation but as of right now the GitHub Org and Discord are now in his hands.

Special Thanks

Thanks to Dan for being cool with me springing this on him. I know I teased it a few times but the decision was literally inspired by some things that happened recently.

The first thing was the leadership summit and Kattni's amazing talk about getting out of the way so the community can jump in and do great things. I can't wait for those videos to be ready to share with the rest of the world.

Another person is my good friend Tim Schilling, whose recent post on stepping down being a good thing was the soft reminder I needed. It also ensured me that the desire to hold on longer than I should is also natural.

My boss, who totally reads my blog, encouraged me to give up ownership of some things at work and it was so beneficial I decided to it in my personal life as well.

Lastly, my amazing co-host of Conduit Kathy Campbell. It's the fact that you run the show. While I could and should be doing more, you've been the reason that we've reached 5 years of podcasting together. Good things happen when I let others take the helm and Conduit is proof of that.

So Dan! Best of luck! Gimme a week to relax and I'll take a look at some issues (promise)!