Timothy Baldridge
patreon
I've been hired by Nexus Mods
🕑 Added 2022-10-21 14:54:41 +0000 UTCSo, to kick off this rather insane news let me start with the formal overview of what's going on with Wabbajack.
Three weeks ago I gave notice to my IRL employer that I’m leaving the company. On October 24th, I’ll start my new job as the Vortex Product Owner at Nexus Mods. Although this may seem like a sudden change, it’s something that’s been in the works for several months. I’m extremely excited for this new job as it will allow me to focus full time on something I very much enjoy: building open source modding tools.
Naturally the first question many of you will ask is: what does this mean for Wabbajack? First of all Wabbajack isn’t going away. Both Vortex and Wabbajack are open source (GPL-3) and can easily continue to operate in their own spaces. I will be scaling back the time I spend on Wabbjack, but part of the point of the transition to 3.0 was to make the project easier to maintain. And as it stands I can easily go several weeks without having to spend chunks of time fixing bugs to keep the project going. In the short term, nothing will change, I will continue to fix critical bug reports in my spare time, but I will not be adding new features to the project. In the long term I hope that the need for Wabbajack will decrease, but time will tell how realistic that goal is. However, the code will always be available on Github, so anyone is welcome to pitch in on fixes or features.
I can’t answer any questions at the moment as to what my plans for Vortex are, as I want to spend some time getting the lay of the land before finalizing my plans. But in broad strokes I will say that I want to focus on making Vortex so amazingly awesome that it becomes the de facto standard for modding on any platform.
On a more personal note, thank you all so much for your support of Wabbajack through the past three years. While my work on the project will be reduced, the app still runs fine without my direct intervention, so please consider continuing to support the project financially as the server and maintenance costs will still exist.
I think this will be a net positive for the entire modding community, and I'm excited to see where both Wabbajack and Vortex go in the next few years.
Comments
Timothy Baldridge
Yes, he and I are working together on the upcoming Vortex updates
Mike Gray
Say, *is* Tannin still involved with Vortex?
Mike Gray
What INCREDIBLE news! I skunked myself on a phishing mail a few weeks back and had to redo all my credit cards, only just realized that my patreon account was b0rked, and hence only just saw this post. Anyway: I'm delighted for you AND for Nexus. Wabbajack is an incredible tool - but if Nexus lists can gain a lot of its functionality, it'll get the word out to a broader audience, hence more awesome lists and mods.
John Barry
Good luck
sojus
Congrats! I'm happy for you! It is sad to see you dialing back development on wabbajack as a result, but at the same time, good for the community in the long term! If I may ask for something: Please consider also platform independence, or at least compatibility with Proton/Wine from the start! Things like the steam deck and linux gaming are (hopefully) here to stay! :) Thanks for all your work!
Timothy Baldridge
I would like to address this a bit, because it's not exactly accurate. For about 3 years now I've been working about 2-4 hours a day after my normal IRL job to write Wabbajack and keep it going. So yes I agree to some extent it is a money thing, I can now work full time on a modding tool instead of spending random hours of my free time working on those same projects. But I think I also need to call out what "Vortex Product Owner" means: I have been given a *lot* of authority over the project. Within reason I have full control over the future of the application. Over the next several weeks I'll be contacting a lot of people in the community to dig into why Vortex is considered "a crappier product". I have my own opinions, but the more feedback the better. At the end of that time I'll start creating a set of design documents and long term goals for the project. So if someone were to ask: "what are you allowed to change about Vortex", the answer is "literally anything and everything". There's a reason Wabbajack works exclusively with Mod Organizer 2 (or no mod manager), because I found Vortex completely unintuitive and obtuse. But MO2 has a ton of problems as well, mostly stemming from the fact that it's written in C++, and feels like it was built in 20 people's spare time over many years. One other thing I think I should probably point out, is that I'm not new to this sort of work. I've been programming for about 28 years, 16 of that professionally. And in that time I've worked for some rather large corporations (Walmart, Consumer Reports, Cisco, Microsoft) and I've seen a lot of good and a lot of bad software design. So think the correct way to look at all of this is: the Nexus would like to see Vortex approve, and decided to hire a professional with fair amount of experience building complex systems to head up the project.
Daniel Hageman
so they hired the mod organizer guy to make a crappier version in Vortex, and now they stole the wabbajack guy for the same crappier tool. Yay. I guess money talks and there wasn't enough donors.
John Muldoon
Congratulations. Having a dream job is pretty sweet. I imagine you will be closing the Wabbajack Patreon since you're ending development. It's been a pleasure supporting you. Thank you for all you've done for the community; and all you will be doing in the future.
Alexander
Whoa awesome! congrats! Hmm, didn't MO2 guy also get hired by Nexus to built Vortex? wonder what happened to him
emelsi
Awesome news, congratulations. I think this is gonna work out for Nexus Mods in the same way that Frito Lay tried out that Montanez guy's idea for hot cheetos.
Johnnyboyy
No one is more deserving to lead modding into the future
AdvocateOfDeath
Congratulations! Hopefully Nexus is able to provide you the team and resources to execute the vision. Will the nexus collections fall under your ownership of Vortex?
daul
Congrats!
LetGoMyLegHo
Congratulations, and so happy/proud of you!
