Difficult decisions

[Cladhaire]

In 2004 I started playing World of Warcraft with my brother and my boyfriend (who would eventually become my fiancee). I really wanted to be a druid, but my boyfriend was playing a druid and I didn't want to "compete" with him, so I rolled a rogue instead. That's how I started raiding and how I began to enjoy the game. At some point it turned out we were a bit low on healers and I was asked to play someone else's priest for an evening. At that point I was hooked. I loved the feeling of supporting a raid through healing.

Naturally, we were raiding Molten Core. We were hardly a hardcode raiding group, but we enjoyed our evenings together. MC meant Lucifron, which meant Decursive was almost a given for raiding. I'll be honest (and I was quite vocal at the time), it never quite seemed right to me. I downloaded an addon called CastParty, written by Danboo. It was a novel approach to casting spells: rather than pressing the spell and then clicking your target you could assign different spells to shift-click, alt-click and control-click. It even came with same defaults that I use today (shift is fast heal, alt is slow big heal, and control is healing over time). CastParty also had this "DoTheRightThing()" function which auto-computed who was the best person to heal and then automatically cast the spell on that person.

The computer scientist in me thought this was pretty interesting. The algorithm got even better over time and could track the rate of incoming damage to estimate what health everyone would have next "tick" so we could better aim the heal to the right person. The player in me didn't like this level of automation.

Sometime in 2005, Vika came out with a new addon called "WatchDog" which was a unit frame with some interesting features. It was the first place I think we saw "tags" that could be used to customize the unit frame. It also integrated the concept of "click-casting" into the unit frame but took a simpler approach than CastParty (it made all healing manual again). People tried to add decursive functionality and DoTheRightThing(), but Vika resisted these changes. I loved the simplicity of the addon.

When Vika was deployed from the military and was no longer able to support WatchDog I took over maintenance. I helped to keep things moving but didn't want to make any large changes and violate Vika's vision. Even when he came back and gave me permission to, it never quite felt right. I ended up splitting the concept of WatchDog into two addons: WatchDog which was the unit frame, and created an addon called Clique to add "click-casting" functionality to WatchDog and any other addon that I wrote a plugin for.

This was all before 2.0 hit and the addon system changed. I was lucky enough to be involved in a small team that worked with Blizzard to help create the secure template and ensure that addons such as Clique would continue to work in the much more restricted addon environment that came out before Burning Crusade. I dedicated a large portion of my time to ensure that click-casting would continue for all addons, and built that functionality into Clique. I even provided tutorials for how click-casting was working, enabling others to write similar addons using the same system.

Somewhere along the line I also created TomTom (designed to help my boyfriend navigate through the world), and LightHeaded. Both were created while sitting on holiday at my sister's house in Phoenix, Arizona. I also created the function hooking libraries for Ace, helped to develop Ace2 and Ace3, the Dongle addon framework, LibStub and many other small projects. I've enjoyed every moment that I've had with these, and I am supremely greatful for all of the help and support I've received from my users. It's the users that kept me going through all of these years, helping me to realise that I was making a difference.

I've written three books about addon development and have had the opportunity to work with Dan Gilbert, Matthew Orlando, Bryan McLemore and Rick Roe. I learned a lot during this process and I stand behind the work we did as being really important for the addon community. I have barely made a cent off of any of the books, and I am completely okay with that.

Between 2007 and and 2012 I worked on my PhD at the University of Oxford. Needless to say this occupied a large amount of my time, but I still dedicated myself to supporting and improving my addons. Although I wasn't playing actively anymore, the "game" of addon development still held sway over me.

My sister was diagnosed with Colon Cancer in May of 2008 at the age of 32. She passed away this February after almost 7 years of smiling and living life in and smiling in spite of her cancer. Needless to say it has been difficult on me and my family, and I would like to thank everyone for their support over the past few years.

I have been grieving for my sister in my own little way, missing her smile and being able to speak with her. I want to spend more time with my niece and nephew and my brother-in-law so that they know I still love them and will continue to be here for them. In a way, I'm also still grieving for my PhD in what I imagine feels a bit like "empty nest" syndrome. It's difficult with so many life changes to know what's next. Both are different, but both require time and introspection.

I really love my job. I'm the Tech Lead for Payments at Spotify. I manage a large group of developers and help to run a large portion of the revenue business that ensures artists are paid fairly and that users have access to our service. I work with amazing people and I really love what I do on a daily basis. I'm living in Sweden with my best friend of almost 11 years and he makes me smile every day. I am surrounded by the rest of my amazing family and they make me feel loved and supported. I'm happy.

It's because I'm happy that I have decided to stop actively supporting my addons. I'm looking for good dedicated authors who might be willing to take what TomTom is today and turn it into something amazing, or someone to see the vision of LightHeaded back to true usefulness. I'm most worried about Clique because that's really my "baby", the thing that's kept me in the game for as long as I have been. I'll continue to do my best to support it, but I would love to find someone who is as dedicated to the cause as I was when I initially took over WatchDog.

Thank you all for your support over the past 10 years. It has been an incredible experience for me. I don't know how long I'll be able to stay away, but I won't be too far away. I hope to be able to find good maintainers (or people willing to take the addons and turn them into something new and exciting) so that you're still able to heal and navigate with the best of them. For now, I'm reachable here and all over the internet. I'm not going very far, I'm just shifting focus so I have time to focus on the things that are important to me in my life.