End of an era.

Tomorrow we're going live with a data migration project that's been in the works for about two years.  I have very mixed feelings about it.  The time has come for Java.net to fold.  I think other factors out of my control helped it get to the point we are today, but regardless, it's time.  I started working on that site ten years ago next month.  That community and site have been the sole focus of my career from that time until abut three years ago, when I took on a higher level role at my company.  

There aren't a lot of community managers who can speak to the real lifecycle of a community, to foster the growth to a place I never thought possible and watch it wane as the context around us evolved.  When Java.net started it was unique.  It was a guess about what developers wanted and was incredibly successful for a long time.  I joined a couple of years after it launched and have seen the membership numbers quadruple since then, and the influence of that community on the Java ecosystem has been incredible.   

But it's time to move on.  The web has changed.  A lot of the features we built that sustained our growth for so long have been irrelevant for years now - project catalogs on the forge were hugely important before Google became what it is today.  Having blogs all in one place was more important before people used aggregators to build their own feeds.  The forge evolved over the years, but the GitHub experiment was incredibly successful and became the forge of choice for the community.  

It's time for the support we give that community to change.  The people are there, just meeting in different places, doing different work.  It's a good thing.  A launching pad for a lot of people.  Certainly it's been that for me.  When I started that internship ten years ago I could not have imagined that it would have led me to where I am today, both professionally and personally.