WiX Toolset has a New Committer
Today it is my pleasure to announce that Sean Hall joins Bob Arnson and I as a committer for the WiX Toolet. This promotion is recognition of all the work Sean does for the WiX Toolset. Today Sean also becomes a part of WiX Toolset history as the first committer that never worked at Microsoft.
I’m a firm believer in promoting someone when they demonstrate the ability to work at the next level. Sean started by contributing interesting features to Burn and staying on top of any bugs those features introduced. Those are behaviors of a fantastic contributor.
However, Sean first caught my eye as the next committer to the WiX Toolset when he started cherry-picking changes from WiX v3 into WiX v4. Work like that is thankless (except by me, of course) but it exposes you to the breadth of the codebase. Both are important qualities of a committer to a codebase.
At some point I pinged Bob and asked, “So what do you think about Sean being a committer?” That’s how promotion works. Out of the blue I ask each existing committer of the project (at the time only Bob) for their honest opinion. The vote must be unanimous.
Bob paused and said something to the effect, “Yeah, I think so.” I don’t remember his exact words but I remember the pause. That’s another indicator of a good committer. You take project wide decisions very seriously. It’s also another indicator of the respect Bob and I have for the work Sean has done.
So we called Sean, he said yes and that is when I informed him he was making history. Before Sean, I’d personally worked with every other committer to the WiX Toolset at Microsoft. AS you might imagine it is infinitely easier to learn how to work within a large codebase when you can sit across the table from the creator every week.
Sean had no such advantage and that makes his achievement even more impressive in my mind.
So please take a moment and join me to congratulate Sean on his promotion as the newest committer to the WiX Toolset.