Burnout Is Real in the OSS World, Says John-David Dalton, Creator of Lodash

If you have a hobby project like writing a blog, crocheting, or almost any other creative hobby, you can dip in and out however it suits you. If you deal with major life events, sicknesses, etc., you can leave the hobby and come back. Nobody is paying you for it, so nobody can complain (maybe the friends who miss you, but it's not actively impacting the real world).

Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure.

It's like if you loved crocheting, but somehow if you stopped crocheting everyone in your city would no longer have clothes and need to walk around naked.

I wrote recently about bringing back my open source project back from the dead. It's more than a decade old. Many life events occured during that time. It's tough. It's nothing like Lodash but honestly these things ebb and flow. It operates in cycles just as life does. Wish him all the best. Sounds like he had many tough years personally and I can relate.

https://go-micro.dev/blog/27

> This conversation was initially just a phone call, but was so powerful that we decided to turn it into a blog and share the audio via YouTube

i can tell - it looks like the blog post doesn't really add anything over a direct transcript of the call itself. it's just a bland summary of the really interesting story Dalton told

Corollary: if software requires constant revisions it didn't actually cover the initial problem scope, and degenerated into a high-latency service state-machine powered by coders. =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

So does this mean no Lodash 5?

I had an open source project (https://github.com/dheera/rosboard) that I burned out and didn't really do a good job continue maintaining.

* I was burned out from work politics at the same time, and had to prioritize fighting those work politics since that's what was paying me. By the end of each day at that company, I didn't feel like staring at a screen any more

* I would get a flurry of poorly-tested pull requests that would break it for some users

* I got lots of suggestions of <feature to implement> which weren't well thought out for how to generalize

* No actually good engineer stepped up to say "I want to help with this"

* There was a commercial alternative that had gotten funding and they were better at marketing

This is unironically why the AGPL3 is the best license. No need to worry about "virality" or derivative works or any of that, just set it and forget it. On top of that, corporations will avoid you like the plague, ensuring that your audience is other AGPL3 users.