Taking a Break From OSS

Last two years have been pretty intensive for me. I became a husband, a father, a co-founder of Powow and during that time I tried to contribute as much as I could to OSS. I was mostly focused on Virtus and Ruby Object Mapper which consumed a lot of my time and energy.

I thought I could go on but I was mistaken. I’ve burned out and decided to take a break from my OSS activities and focus on my family and daily work.

I’m really happy we managed to push the first version of ROM this year and just yesterday I released Virtus 1.0.0. It’s probably not the best moment to take a break but I really reached my limits and I need to step back for a while.

Here’s what I decided to do. As of today:

• I won’t be monitoring github
• I won’t be replying to emails from github because I’ve set up a filter and all emails from github are going to my archive
• I won’t be in the #rom-rb irc channel
• I’ll try to avoid twitter ;)

I know this sounds a bit drastic but I don’t see any other way to do it. I feel passionate about OSS and it’s a bit like a drug for me so I need to stay away as much as possible otherwise I’ll get sucked in instantly.

While I’m “gone” I plan to blog a bit more though, hopefully you should see some new posts here. I’d love to finally finish the “Get Rid of That Code Smell” series and write more about my experiences while working on ROM.

Virtus issues will be handled by elskwid who offered help (thank you!). ROM is under active development by the rest of the team, so don’t worry about it.

Thanks to everyone who I had the opportunity to work with and thanks for all the support - it means a lot to me.

I should be back before end of the year.

Cheers!