My opensource burnout

As I’m taking time off work, after about 40 completely unbearable days, I’m getting some time to reflect on myself. While I am putting a lot of things together in my life that I am not really willing to share so openly on the internet, I would like to talk about the tech side of things, the ones that usually end up on this blog. I didn’t need much to reach the obvious conclusion: I’ve reached the point of opensource burnout, in particular when dealing with my maintainer role of ExternalDNS.

What burnout looks like

Well, it’s complicated. I burned out pretty hard in 2015 when I was working in Milan and it was a very unpleasant experience. I am always happy to talk about this experience because I learned a lot from it. Lots was messy in my life and it was so bad, I promised I would never drag myself that far again. I was lucky that I didn’t do anything particularly bad and with the help of my significant other, I changed things and managed to get myself back on a good track. But not all burnouts look the same, not all have the same impact. In this case, the way it looks is that I really don’t want to answer the questions from the community. I don’t want to deal with pull requests that are unnecessarily big. My contributions went from “this is fun” to “this is just unpaid work”, from “it’s going to contribute to my growth” to “I just feel this is a responsibility” and I realize it is unhealthy. I mostly kept going because nobody else was taking really care of the project, but things are slowly changing. An old colleague stepped in to help a bit more, we onboarded two new maintainers which make me happy and make me feel not alone anymore. But the lack of joy working on the project doesn’t stop. That’s how burnout looks like this time. If you ask me, much much better than in 2015 as it doesn’t affect my real day to day. I’ll take this as a win.

What am I going to do about it

Honestly, I am not sure. I am currently on a break to deal with a time that is especially busy for my family and I intend to keep staying on this break for the time being. I don’t mind approving a couple of PRs if needed, but I will not be the bottleneck again and I will not take any other big development task. I will be gentle with myself and accept that my energy levels are what they are and what I give is only what I can give. I will forgive myself for not having the energy to contribute anymore and I will tell myself that I don’t have any responsibility to contribute to the community. I will put myself first to try to restore the fun of staying around technology as much as possible, outside of the work tasks which I sometimes just have to do. I said this other times, I didn’t do it. This time, I write it and maybe it’s for real and maybe it will be enough, maybe it won’t. I hope it will. Until the next one, cheers.