Dear co-developers, dear users, but most of all dear Bee,

Last saturday marked the thirteenth release of BitlBee (counting the 'x.xxa' versions). Version 0.85. It's been almost two years since we first started working on BitlBee.

Back then I had a job on the other side of the country. After a good day of coding I travelled two to three hours by train. These hours were almost exclusively filled with Bee-coding.

I remember being overly confident in my own skills. Sending out patches to Wilmer, without even compile-testing it. Oh my, dear Bee, you certainly set me straight there. I had to fix the code at 0300h (AM!) because we wanted to release at 0538h. Fortunately, the fixed code contains only one known bug after almost two years.

BitlBee has certainly outgrown my boldest expectations. It was a small project at first. Not unresembling some of my private projects. Interesting, but not much. But BitlBee had potential. Great potential. And it used it. Nowadays BitlBee is running on a number of public servers. The official public Bee server has about 100 users at any moment!

I enjoyed working on the Bee. From the moment I named it, till today, I've been a fan. It's one of those tools I use everyday and use it with pleasure. It's unfortunate I worked on it though, because I can't say I LOVE the program :)

I've not been the perfect developer. Ever since that first summer, my contributions have been small. Usually just some support to a random user or a small patch to do something nice. For that reason I've been thinking about quitting development for a long time. I believe it's the fair thing to do, now that I count the lines of code I do know, instead of the lines I don't know.

Wilmer, Maurits, I wish you best of luck with future development of the Bee. I think you'll continue to develop a great program. A program which makes me proud to once have contributed to.

Thank you, dear Bee, for those pleasant hours of coding and the lessons learned. It has been my pleasure and my honour to have been able to add my two cents to your extensive functionality and usefulness.

So long, my little Bee. GoodBee.

Sjoerd 'Lucumo' Hemminga