Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Exciting announcement: I am leaving the classroom to develop g(Math) full-time!

tl;dr: I am excited to announce that after the end of this school year (mid-June) I will be leaving the classroom to develop g(Math) full-time! In the meantime, please bear with me as it might take longer to respond to issues as the school year wraps up.

long version: Back in 2013 (I only know based on my blogposts) I started to learn how to code in Google Apps Script. In the past 3 years, I have found a passion for developing g(Math). But this passion has only been my hobby. I have been a full-time classroom teacher and coding in my free time. For all you teachers out there, we all know that the students come first and like all of you I am super busy during this time of year (IB exams, preparing for the end of the semester, AP exams, coming back from Spring Break, etc...). I normally wake up around 3AM to code and provide support for g(Math) and pride myself on responding to help requests within 24 hours.
As g(Math) has grown, I have been humbled by the support and rate at which people around the world have used it! I must admit that it is flattering that some people out there think I am a Google employee and that Google actively supports g(Math) (they have an amazing platform, but all the coding has been done solely by me  :).
As a result of its popularity, I can no longer continue g(Math) as a hobby and will be leaving the classroom to develop g(Math) full-time. There are so many features that I want to implement, I am excited to finally have the time to work on them all. At the same time there are issues that pop-up in g(Math) that need my immediate attention and I don't have enough time to continue to teach as well. For example, I had another server issue tonight that broke the expressions for a little bit (I have transferred over to the Google Cloud Engine and have addressed (hopefully) the issue so it won't happen again) and I was working furiously to fix it.
So I hope that you will continue to support g(Math) as I work through this transition period. My students and my teaching do come first, so I can't really provide routine support during my school day hours. As I look back at the first iterations of g(Math) (which I am still extremely proud of), I am amazed how far g(Math) has come and excited to be able to continue to hone the g(Math) experience to become more professional and robust! It will be bittersweet to leave the classroom, my daily interaction with students and my co-workers, but I will always stay connected and have the teacher/student experience in mind when incorporating any features in g(Math)!