Hi all, I'm in the process of signing up as mentor on the Incubator wiki and thought I'd better introduce myself since I don't expect anybody around here to know me.
Like many people I came to the ASF to scratch a few itches I encountered with an existing project I used at work. In my case it was JServ in around 1998 but I mainly remained a pure user with the occasional bug report back then. But I gradually became more involved over time. In 2000 I was voted in as a committer to Ant and later the year as a member of the ASF. Today I still am an active committer to Ant, the PMC chairman of Gump and involved in a few smaller parts of Commons and the remainings of Jakarta. A few years ago I mentored Apache Ivy through incubation so I already wear my Incubator scars. During work hours the .NET platform has become my main development target since 2005. Even though all the ASF projects I'm involved in are Java projects I'm very familiar with C# and the platform in general. Early last year I coded up a prototype for a customer project (that never took off) using Lucene.NET and recall how "wrong" it felt so I fully understand and appreciate the need for an idiomatic API. It's my goal to keep out of any technical decisions, that's really up to the committers to decide. I may find time to participate in the discussions and even provide a patch or two but won't promise anything. I hope I can contribute a small part to a successful reboot of the project. Let's enjoy the ride. Stefan -- http://stefan.samaflost.de/
