I got tired of open-source 🥲

Yep, that’s the title

There’s no click-bait. Though I’m at home working remotely, meaning that I have a ton of time to spare, I - at times - feel extremely overwhelmed by the notifications on GitHub. I fear of opening up the notifications tab, and I cannot withstand reading all the issues and PRs that are just collecting dust.

Why?

I once enjoyed a lot - creating a project, sharing it on GitHub, and seeing people’s discussions. However, that experience has left me a long time ago, apparently. What’s left is only tiredness and dissatisfaction.

Sometimes it feels nice to just focus on your own little project, add some features that you’ve always wanted, and feed content - that’s all. But for open-source projects, that’s not always the case. There would always be feature requests, you’re expected to be on 24-7 standby, and people are filling up your inbox with questions that you need to answer (politely). It gets tiresome very quickly, and it drains people’s enthusiasm for what’s worse.

Look on the bright-side…

It’s still nice to open-source your work, and I encourage everyone to do so. Take this as an example.

PaimonMenuBar is a macOS app made with SwiftUI, and it’s my first time writing Swift. Had I not open-sourced it, I wouldn’t have been able to fix the obnoxious bug that drained my Mac’s battery. A PR helped my refactor the entire codebase - into a more manageable model.

Open-source is rewarding, is what I’m trying to say. So please don’t feel discouraged because of what I’m saying in this self-mourning blog post.

What about…?

I figured you’d guess it, I’m talking about onedrive-vercel-index. I’ve been deliberately ignoring PRs and issues for a couple of weeks by now. It’s primarily @myl7 who has been taking care of the discussions and issue questions, and sending in a PR every once in a while. Anyway, I need to take a break from all these nonsense feelings that I’m experiencing, before I can get back to these projects. I may still push commits to other repos, as I still use GitHub, and I still code :)

I would call this thing I’m feeling - burn’t out, so before I feel ready enough to get back to the other projects, take care. 🍀