Open Source Guilt

Alex Bilbie posted a heartfelt message about one of his open source projects and how he felt a huge burden of guilt for not following through with it.

I feel that on reflection I was fundamentally depressed and fed up. I felt terribly burnt out and couldn’t even comprehend looking at a computer screen once I got home from work, I was unhappy with where I was living and I felt immense pressure because so many other developers were depending on me for help working with my code. Some people started to call me out publicly – and rightly so, others were rude and hurtful towards to me and I’m ever grateful to Phil Sturgeon for shooting them down for being arseholes. I’d hit a rut and I needed to get out of it.

With Wardrobe I can personally relate to a few things. I’ve been working on v2 on and off for 7 months now and still don’t feel it’s 100% ready for prime time. But it always lingers in the back of my mind. New features, new ideas, better ways of structuring, new themes, and on and on.

Open source is really a weird ecosystem. Yes having community involvement is great but from my experiences they rarely share the same vision. You need to have a clear outline and well defined standards. Which in of itself is a pain since you are just doing it in your spare time. I want to create open source for fun and to code, not to spend time with managerial duties.