Hello Tobias,

After over three years of service your term as Joomla! 3.10 Release Lead is over. What should I say? It had its ups and downs but the stable factor was you. The whole Joomla community was lucky to have you as the 3.10 release lead during this time.

Our Release Lead journey started when I took over the 4.1 releases and you were one of the main people showing me the bits and bytes of how to create successful releases. While I was more the spontaneous and easy going guy you were extremely structured and focused. This mindset has saved some releases, especially the Joomla! 4.0 releases where you discovered at the last minute a major issue. Your knowledge heavily influenced subsequent release managers as you helped set up the current best practice release list. Many weekends we sat together in Google Meets, building pre-releases and thankfully you insisted on sticking to the list each and every time.

You probably were not aware of it, but the fact that Ionos is sponsoring our Pizza, Bugs & Fun events is also your merit. It started with our Hackathon project a few years ago, where we built Joomla! implementation for them and your work paved the way to get in touch with them for further collaboration and sponsorship.

At the beginning I asked: what should I say? Now that we're ready to say goodbye to our trusted companion Joomla 3, I think the only thing to say is a very grateful: Thank you, Tobias, for your unparalleled dedication, your countless hours of hard work, and your unwavering belief in the power of open-source collaboration. Thank you from me personally for your support, help and although I wasn't easy all the time, your endurance.

I hope you will stick with the Joomla! community in the future, we're really benefiting from your knowledge and commitment. Thank you for over three successful years being a Release Lead. You have left big footprints.

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.