Life’s funny; today in my Google Reader tally I ran across this post by Steven Wittens - titled ‘On not doing Drupal anymore’, and it helped put some personal frustrations in to perspective for me on the concept of ‘burnout’ in the modern open development age.

Open Source Burnout

It’s clear by the article that a long stint of working deep in the Drupal community, and in turn working with a large ‘statistical average’ of that community has caused an acute case of burn-out for Steven. All of the half-efforts, nonconstructive bickering, petty anonymous commenters, and general unprofessional nature of the community has worn him down to a point where he is no longer able to maintain his personal level of professionalism.

His words are certainly interesting (emphasis mine):

Various people have prodded me to explain my recent involvement in Drupal, or rather the lack of it. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to do so in a way that is constructive and tactful, especially not when it comes to other contributors. […] At the end of the day, I feel that the vast majority of contributors is not willing or not able to apply the level of diligence that I apply to my own Drupal work. This is both in terms of technical background and research, as well as in the actual execution and quality assurance.

Unfortunately, I’m not directly familiar with Steven’s work, but I get the impression that he is someone who cares passionately about what he’s working on, and is very meticulous to do the best, and most thorough job he can. Furthermore, while I haven’t had any conversations with him, I also get the impression he is generally very patient, and tries to carry the burden imposed by others for the good of the project.

That being said, to the uninitiated, his words sound harsh and arrogant. It makes him sound like he’s decided he’s better than most of the Drupal development community. While I doubt he thinks that way, a small percentage of individuals can create ripples in the middle of the pool that they themselves don’t feel, but others around them do, significantly.

My Sympathies

Now, I certainly don’t work on Drupal, nor have I committed significantly on any large open source project for a while now; but I have felt a similar burnout. Personal blog posts, several years at Javalobby, and working in the Eclipse plug-in community have taught me one thing really well - the internet, particularly the wing of it filled with the rather elitist software development community and other technical nerdery, is one harsh mistress.

Some of the most brilliant developers have some unbelievable nerve in what they say and how they behave. Amazingly, the most arrogant, self-righteous, and bastardly posters I have come across often were presenting the face of a company or product as they did so. After two full years working for Rick and Matt at Javalobby and EclipseZone, I was burnt out, but it took me a while to realize that while the hours along with my daytime consulting were part of it, another big part of it was just the fact that I spent so much time agonizing over everything I posted because there were a seemingly endless nest of vipers waiting to pounce.

Surprisingly, at least in my experience, people have a way of being tactless without intent. More often than not, if I were to call someone on their attitude, I would discover it was not intentional, or was a knee-jerk reaction they later regretted.

Admittedly, my Javalobby burnout didn’t come from people who coded like they didn’t care (and in turn leaving me with the feeling of having to carry their work) - that is something I have experienced, but not from Javalobby.

It’s taken me over a year to come back around and truly understand the percentages. Honestly, I can name the majority of my antagonizers from Javalobby. Because their flak cannons were firing so often, it felt like there was no clean air to breathe, but in reality, there were still only a few guns blazing.

That being said, i still get emails to this day from people on articles that are now three years old. I can’t possibly count the number of positive comments I have received. A lot of times, the positive feedback can go un-noticed; feeling good is an easy emotion; meanwhile embarrassment, anger, and frustration will burn, and they burn for a long time.

Why All of this Matters

A close friend of mine recently told me that in the end being successful is not just about being the most skillful or brilliant developer, and it’s not just about having the best ideas; it’s about knowing how to work with people - and that really means knowing how to work with the worst people.

I’ve been working on a personal project for about two months now, and it’s occupied most of my spare time; part of the reason that I have been so quiet here at RealJenius.com (the other part is that I’m lazy, it was the holidays, and I just didn’t have anything interesting to say to all 10 of my blog aggregatees).

This project is something that really belongs in the hands of the open source community. I made several mistakes with my last attempt - the code folding plug-in for Eclipse. The biggest mistake was developing something I wasn’t passionate about. Oh, sure, initially I was, but I wasn’t passionate enough to commit to it. The other big mistake was putting it in the hands of people too quickly. 1.0.0 was not really a consumable product. 1.0.6 carries some embarrassing bugs. That plug-in should have been written, and then written again when I actually understood the Eclipse editor model.

All that being said, it was still remarkably well received for it’s time, and does deserve some love; people do still use it. I’m not sure I’m the person to give it that love, largely because I don’t use it; but it’s waiting at google code for an eager coder.

Because of those mistakes, I have been very careful to make sure I’m passionate about this project, and that it is receiving the patience and polish it needs before the ‘mob’ gets it.

However, I think, and this was my revelation, that I’m also carrying a degree of hesitation in giving over to the community with so many teeth. I’ve grown to hate so much about the internet community (YouTube comments are a perfect embodiment of my point), and that makes giving something that you really care about (which describes my Javalobby tutorials as much as my current project) to the ultimate critics a very agitating proposition.

I wish I could find the “Just don’t give a shit” switch like so many of the blow-hards on the internet; if only it were that easy.