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Neglect and Guilt

I have too many hobby projects and too little time for them. I’m sure this outlandish concept is wholly unfamiliar to you, dear reader.

For me the main motivation behind open source and hobby work is, quite simply, to have an enjoyable time and maybe learn a few new things along the way. From this perspective, Gemini and Lagrange have been and continue to be quite excellent, from building my own UI framework to trying to decipher OpenSSL’s API and the complicated details of Unicode.

But then there are all the other projects waiting on the shelf, some of them with decades of history. I feel a certain amount of guilt having too much fun with one project while letting the others languish without real attention paid to them.

Of course, I can come up with rationalizations why one project is more important at any given time, but putting one on the shelf and working on another doesn’t really change the dynamics of the situation. I’ll still have a shelf full of cool projects waiting for their turn. I suppose this is an unsolvable problem, given the finite amount of leisure time available.

Looking back at the past nine months, I’m a little surprised how much time I’ve managed to spend working on Lagrange. I hope the situation continues, but as the pandemic (hopefully) winds down and things normalize, I expect the circumstances to be less amenable to hobby work. But who knows what the future holds...

📅 2021-04-12

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