A ten-year retrospective from LWN's other co-founder [LWN.net]

January 28, 2008

This article was contributed by Elizabeth O. Coolbaugh

Hello to all LWN readers! For the tenth anniversary of LWN, I've been dragged out of my closet to say a few words. Am I stunned that LWN is still going after 10 years? Not really. Much more stunning to me is the realization that the number of years LWN has been published without me are now almost double the number of years it was published with me. That is much harder to get over. As a result, all new readers from 2002 on have no reason to know who I am or what I've written in the past. For those of you that remember me and have asked about me, thank you and rest assured that I haven't forgotten you either.

My name is Elizabeth Coolbaugh (Liz) and I was there for the very first issue as well as many issues that followed in 1998 through 2001. I've always said it was the very best job I ever had. I wish for all of you, if you haven't experienced it yet, a job where your first weeks of work are greeted with happy, enthusiastic letters. As the years went by, letters of praise, though much sparser, never totally ceased. You couldn't have a better incentive to work harder and harder!

Jon has done an excellent job of going over the history of the first few years already, so all I can add is some tidbits or personal viewpoints. I'll mention that for me, the start of LWN was actually back in the early 1980's, when Jon, Becky and I came together as a programming team in the then infamous "Assembly Language Programming" class offered through the Engineering School at CU Boulder. We got a chance to experience lots of late nights, interesting hardware experiences and how to keep going with pizza, chocolate, caffeine, etc. That is a good way to get to know your future business partners. Jon and Becky never let me down and we all found different strengths to add to the mix. Forrest was around, too, though not working with us directly at the time.

Jon mentioned that I was between jobs at the time we began. In fact, I had left NCAR three months pregnant. I loved working at NCAR for many, many years, but I had always said that I would leave it when the work stopped being fun. It actually stopped being fun about two years before that, but I had weathered rough times before and waited to make sure the situation wasn't going to turn-around before choosing to move on. The challenge of a new baby on the way (and the continuing challenge of the Multiple Sclerosis that eventually led to my departure from LWN) finally made it "the right time".

So I'd actually had most of a year off to recuperate, re-organize, have a baby and test the job market waters. What I wanted was a job that used my professional skills and yet was part-time, to help me keep the health I'd regained. What a pipe-dream! Companies that would have gladly recruited me full-time just tossed my resume into the nearest recycle bin. The nicer ones told me to go out and find someone else with identical skills who wanted to job-share a full-time job and they would be willing to consider the possibility. Not bloody likely.

So when Jon and I were having lunch and he suggested we might be able to work together to create something giving me what I wanted and allowing him to eventually leave NCAR, it seemed to be the right idea at the right time. I never regretted the decision, but in fact, I had a full-time working spouse to cushion the decision. Brandon's reaction (my husband) to becoming the sole support of the family and a new father in one fell swoop was a little different -- much like a deer full-blinded by headlights.

In the spirit of true confessions, though I had fifteen years experience in the computing field and had worked with many different operating systems, VMS and Solaris being primary, I'd never actually touched a Linux system. Jon's unwavering belief in my ability to pick it all up in a heartbeat was both daunting and encouraging at the same time. So I installed my first Linux system only three or four months before we first started publishing. It did give me a fresh, unbiased view of the whole community, though. Okay, not totally unbiased. I did sit on the emacs side of the whole emacs/vi war.

To get started, I subscribed to say, a hundred different newsgroups and mailing lists full of people I'd never met, topics I'd never heard of and flame wars I didn't care to read. It was truly a new skill to develop to learn to skim through them searching for the topics people cared about, the posts that actually carried real information and gently lift each little kernel of "news" out and place in into the newsletter, then wait to hear how well I'd done.

The response was totally overwhelming. I will never, ever forget the emails we received those first couple of months. New people were finding us each week and so the responses kept coming in. They drove me to try and make my contributions worthy of the praise they sent. It is because of those emails that I'm not surprised LWN is still out there today. People wanted and needed what we had to offer. Jon's vision of what people liked and wanted has always been clear and that is another important piece of why LWN is still going strong.

My take on the Red Hat Support fiasco: I have no hard feelings. Although my work as a systems administrator had always included supporting people and I had enjoyed the interaction, I had no idea what I was getting into offering 24 hour support from my home. Just as my daughter was getting old enough to give me a full-night's sleep, I was getting phone calls at 2am and 3am, having to wake up to a fully alert state and go into emergency fix-it mode. I'm surprised I survived until all the contracts we had sold finally expired. In the long run, Red Hat's ideas gave us the courage to start our own business and since writing for LWN was what I learned to love, I consider the end result to have worked out for the best. I also carefully noted for the future that telephone support work was definite going to be a last resort for any future career moves.

Meanwhile, since the few contracts we had didn't bring in enough to pay the bills, let alone enough to support Jon's full-time entry, I also did contract work as a technical writer, remote or on-site administration of Linux for some local companies and I don't even remember what else. Eventually, Jon had to take the risk, forgo waiting for a reliable income and quit his day job in order to increase the income stream. Note that his early work on LWN was always done in addition to continuing his full-time job and trying to increase our income stream at the same time. No wonder he got grumpy if I was out sick or worse, got to head to a fun Linux conference, leaving him to pick up the slack! Of course, it was terrifying in turn for me when the situation reversed and Jon was unavailable. Picking up the kernel page for the week? Ack! I didn't usually complain. Instead, I kept my head low, worked hard and hoped not to see too many corrections or criticisms come in.

It was wonderful for both Jon and I when we were finally able to add Becky to the mix. I think initially we were only able to scrape up enough to pay her for 10 hours a week, but every hour helped. I haven't forgotten, Becky (okay, it should be Rebecca, but she'll always be Becky to me), the hours you put in at a very low rate of pay. Of course, we did pay you first -- the downside to being the business owners for us.

Over the course of the next couple of years, we continued to bring in our income from other sources. We did actually initiate putting some advertising on our site and it brought in a tiny amount of money, but the bread and butter of the company continued to be contract work done in addition to the weekly publication. That included our most successful side foray, building and teaching Linux classes.

What else did I love about LWN? I so enjoyed the friendships I made throughout so many different communities. Will Rogers once said he never met a man he didn't like. Well, I've met many! But truly, in all the years I worked for LWN, I never met anyone I didn't like. Sometimes people I liked said things or did things that I didn't like, but underneath it, they were all good people, smart, idealistic and very strongly opinionated. That was part of what I liked and enjoyed, so I never held people's opinions against them.

The conferences I attended and at which I spoke were like the icing on the cake. I got to meet in-person people I had only come to know through newsgroups and mailing lists or occasionally personal correspondence. I got to meet even more people and share in the excitement. And yes, I do remember the late nights going out for food, drink and conversation with you -- the Atlanta Showcase, LinuxWorld San Jose, Embedded Systems Conference San Jose, LinuxWorld New York, the Colorado Linux Info Quest and the Singapore Linux Conference. Each one provides me with rich memories. My trip out to Singapore was one high-point. So many good and wonderful people and such a wonderful experience. I thought it was to be the first of many international conferences that I would be attending and I am still so sad that it was my last. I particularly regret never making it out to any of early Linux conferences in India, despite invitations.

Professionally, though, the highlight of the work was actually developing myself as a journalist, rather than a computer expert. I enjoyed researching more in-depth articles. When rumors floated my way, I loved actually going out and contacting the people involved first hand by telephone -- short-circuiting email and the rest, to discuss the issues and get their first-hand viewpoints. Since our community wasn't exactly hounded by the media back then, everybody actually wanted to talk to me and was more than happy to give me the straight scoop, instead of just seeing themselves misquoted elsewhere the next day, with the resultant flames. Best of all, I was occasionally able to get the sources of both sides of a controversy together and talk. I can think of at least twice where problems got resolved as a result, people got together and I got the scoop on a story the next day that had literally changed as a result of my work. Very heady stuff.

Jon has already done an excellent job of covering our experience with the dot-com bubble, so I won't add to his description. It was truly a unique life experience that we enjoyed to the fullest, knowing that another like it was unlikely to come by us again. We were very fortunate in our decisions and I agree that the people at Tucows were extremely good to us.

Well, at this point, all this happened a long time ago. I had a great time and regret nothing I did, only the things I didn't get time to do. For those who have asked after me personally, be assured that health-wise, giving up my job was again the right choice at the right time and I'm doing much, much better than I was in August of 2001. You're still not likely to see me back any time in the near future. I focus my research skills now-a-days on tracking traditional and alternative medical discoveries, implementing what seems good to me and serving as an ad-hoc resource for other family members. Oh yes, and serving as a chauffeur to my daughter, who is now ten years old, just as LWN is. Take care, all of you, remember to be proud of what you are achieving and *always* have fun doing it. I stand by my opinion that when work ceases to be fun, it is time for a change.

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