[sdegutis]

> For the first time in years I had time to do silly stuff like playing video games, going out for a walk or watch movies. For the first time in years I didnt grit my teeth and churn out that little bit of code that would help me develop my skills further.

> It feels great.

I can totally relate. A few months ago, I started giving up on my open source projects, as a side-effect of burnout. Admittedly part of the solution was working hard to give up the hubris inside me that made me think my code and my ideas were vital to the world. But now that it's given up, I really do have a lot more free time. Last night, I was under a blanket on the couch, reading two full Sherlock Holmes[1] stories to my wife and children, who were just drawing or cuddling on the couch or whatever. We just kicked back and relaxed, and we all enjoyed it.

The downside is that I now have a hard time keeping the motivating excitement going for new ideas I have. Just the other week I had an idea for a node-webkit-like idea based on JSCocoa, but it involved rewriting major parts of JSCocoa to get it to work properly. I've gotten pretty far[2] but I'm losing steam quickly and falling back into the "meh" state of life in which I'm now more interested in playing Starcraft 2 for an hour or two, or drawing some doodles. So it's a weird balance that I can't figure just yet.

[1]: Later that night I read The Purloined Letter to my wife as she painted some walls, and we both enjoyed it but thought it was a little bit long-winded for what it had to say.

[2]: http://github.com/sdegutis/chaos

[mattgreenrocks]

That's a pretty neat project. Since it's a big effort, you shouldn't beat yourself up about it.

You should be honest with yourself about motivations and reasons for doing open source. Do it because you like tinkering, not because it's a resume-builder. Truth is, open source is not a meritocracy, it's more of a lottery. I've been mildly successful (as in, entranced a nascent community) at it for a time, but I found it a bit stressful with expectations and all.

PS: do you work at 8th Light?

[sdegutis]

> That's a pretty neat project. Since it's a big effort, you shouldn't beat yourself up about it.

Thanks.

> You should be honest with yourself about motivations and reasons for doing open source. Do it because you like tinkering, not because it's a resume-builder. Truth is, open source is not a meritocracy, it's more of a lottery. I've been mildly successful (as in, entranced a nascent community) at it for a time, but I found it a bit stressful with expectations and all.

I was initially motivated by it being an interesting problem to solve. But I quickly ran into it being more difficult than interesting, so my steam started running out faster. I may be able to salvage it if there's any community interest in it, but it's difficult to get anyone interested without having a working prototype to demo, which is actually the hardest part of this project (i.e. dealing with libffi and boxing ObjC objects, etc).

> PS: do you work at 8th Light?

I used to. Now I work for http://www.cleancoders.com/