drewdevault.com

Stress-and-happiness.md (9216B)

---
date: 2020-01-21
layout: post
title: The happinesses and stresses of full-time FOSS work
tags: [foss, maintainership]
---
In the past few days, several free software maintainers have come out to discuss
the stresses of their work. Though the timing was suggestive, my article last
week on the philosophy of project governance was, at best, only tangentially
related to this topic - I had been working on that article for a while. I do
have some thoughts that I'd like to share about what kind of stresses I've
dealt with as a FOSS maintainer, and how I've managed (or often mismanaged) it.
February will mark one year that I've been working on self-directed free
software projects full-time. I was planning on writing an optimistic
retrospective article around this time, but given the current mood of the
ecosystem I think it would be better to be realistic. In this stage of my
career, I now feel at once happier, busier, more fulfilled, more engaged, more
stressed, and more depressed than I have at any other point in my life.
The good parts are numerous. I'm able to work on my life's passions, and my
projects are in the best shape they've ever been thanks to the attention I'm
able to pour into them. I've also been able to do more thoughtful, careful work;
with the  extra time I've been able to make my software more robust and reliable
than it's ever been. The variety of projects I can invest my time into has also
increased substantially, with what was once relegated to minor curiosities now
receiving a similar amount of attention as my larger projects were receiving in
my spare time before. I can work from anywhere in the world, at any time, not
worrying about when to take time off and when to put my head down and crank out
a lot of code.
The frustrations are numerous, as well. I often feel like I've bit off more than
I can chew. This has been the default state of affairs for me for a long time;
I'm often neglecting half of my projects in order to obtain progress by leaps
and bounds in just a few. Working on FOSS full-time has cast this model's
disadvantages into greater relief, as I focus on a greater breadth of projects
and spend more time on them.
The attention and minor fame I've received as a result of my prolific efforts
also has profound consequences. On the positive line of thought, I'm somewhat
embarrassed to admit that I've noticed my bug reports and feature requests on
random projects (or even my own projects) being taken more seriously now, which
is almost certainly more related to name recognition than merit. I often receive
thanks and words of admiration from my... fans? I guess I have those now.
Sometimes these are somewhat unwelcome, with troubled individuals writing
difficult to decipher half-rants laden with strange praises and bizarre
questions. Other times I'm asked out of the blue to join a discussion I was
unaware of, to comment on some piece of technology I've never used or to take a
stand on some argument which I wasn't privy to. I don't enjoy these kinds of
comments. But, they're not far removed from the ones I like - genuine,
thoughtful praise arrives in my inbox fairly often and it makes the job a lot
more worthwhile.
Of course, a similar sort of person exists on the opposite extreme. There are
many people who hate my guts and anything I've ever worked on, and who'll go out
of their way to let me and anyone else who'll listen to them know how they feel.
Of course, I have *earned* the ire of no small number of people, and I regret
many of these failed interpersonal relationships. These cases are in the
minority, however - most of the people who will tell tales of my evil are people
who I've never met. There's a lot of spaces online that I just won't visit
anymore because of them. As for the less extreme of this sort of person, I'll
also reiterate what others have said - the negative effects of entitled,
arrogant, or outright toxic users is profound. Don't be that person.
In either case, I can never join new communities on the same terms as anyone
else does. At least one person in every new community already has some
preconception of me when I arrive. Often I think about making an alias just to
enjoy the privilege of anonymity again.
A great help has been my daily interactions with the many friends and colleagues
who are dear to me. I've made lifelong friends of many of the people I've met
through these projects.  Thanks to FOSS, I have met an amazing number of kind,
talented, generous people.  Every day, I'm thankful to and amazed by the
hundreds of people who have found my ideas compelling, and who come together to
contribute their own ideas and set aside their precious time to work together
realizing our shared dreams. If I'm feeling blue, often all it takes to snap me
out of it is to reflect on the gratitude I feel for these wonderful people. I'll
never be able to thank my collaborators enough, but hell, I could stand to do it
some more anyway.
I also have mixed feelings about how *busy* I am. Every day I wake up to a
hundred new emails, delete half of them, and spend 3-4 hours working on the
rest. Patches, questions, support inquiries, monitoring & reports, it's endless.
On top of that, I have dozens of things I already need to work on. The CI work
distribution algorithm needs to be completely redone; I need to provision new
hardware — oh yeah, and, the hardware that I need ran into shipping
issues, again; I need to improve monitoring; I need to plan for FOSDEM; I need
to finish the Wayland book; I need to figure out the memory issues in himitsu
— not to mention write the rest of the software; I need to file taxes,
twice as much work when you own a business; I need to implement data export
& account deletion; I need to finish the web-driven patch review UI; I need
to finish writing docs for Alpine; I have to work more on the PinePhone; I have
a legacy server which needs to be overhauled and is now on the clock because of
ACMEv1; names.sr.ht needs to be finished...
Not to mention the tasks which have been on hold for longer now than they've
been planned for in the first place. Alpine is still going to have hundreds of
Python 2 packages by EoL; the ppc64le server is gathering dust in the
datacenter; there's been some bug with fosspay for several months, in which it
doesn't show Patreon figures unless I reboot the process every now and then;
RISC-V work is stalled because the work is currently blocked by a large problem
that I can't automate; the list of blog posts I want to write is well over 100
entries long. There are *several dozen* other loose ends I haven't mentioned
here but am painfully aware of anyway.
That's not even considering any personal goals, which I have vanishingly little
time for. I get zero exercise, and though my diet is mostly reasonable the
majority of it is delivery unless I get the odd 2 hours to visit the grocery
store. That is, unless I want to spend those 2 hours with my friends, which
means it's back to delivery. My dating life is almost nonexistent. I want to
spend more time studying Japanese, but it's either that or keeping up with my
leisure reading. Lofty goals of also studying Chinese or Arabic are but dust in
the wind. I'm addicted to caffeine, again.
There have been healthy ways and unhealthy ways of dealing with the occasional
feelings of being overwhelmed by all of this. The healthier ways have included
taking walks, reading my books, spending a few minutes with my cat, doing
chores, and calling my family to catch up. Less healthy ways have included
walking to the corner store to buy unhealthy comfort foods, consuming alcohol or
weed too much or too often, getting in stupid internet arguments, being mean to
my friends and colleagues, and googling myself to read negative comments.
Despite being swamped with all of this work, it's all work that I love. I love
writing code, and immeasurably more so when writing *my* code. Sure, there are
tech debt skeletons in the closet here and they're keeping me awake at night, but
on the whole I feel lucky to be able to write the software I want to write, the
way I want to write it. I've been trying to do that my entire life —
writing code for someone else has always been a huge drain on my emotional
well-being.  That's why I worked on my side projects in the first place, to have
an outlet through which I could work on self-directed projects without making
compromises for some arbitrary deadline.
When I'm in the zone, writing lots of code for a project I'm interested in,
knowing it's going to have a meaningful impact on my users, knowing that it's
being written under my terms, it's the most rewarding work I've ever done. I get
to do that every day.
This isn't the retrospective I wanted to write, but it's nice to drop the veneer
for a few minutes and share an honest take on what this is like. This year has
been nothing like what I expected it to be - it's both terrible and wonderful
and very busy, very goddamn busy. In any case, I'm extremely grateful to be here
doing it, and it's thanks to many, many supportive people - users, contributors,
co-maintainers, and friends. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.