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Who?

Github: Fatih Arslan

Projects: vim-go, color, structs, vim-go-tutorial, camelcase, vim-hclfmt, hclfmt, images, hcl, unexport, flags, stopwatch

Date:

Why?

Fatih Arslan announced that they were sunsetting eleven of their projects according to this blog post. They began the post talking about how they making major changes in their life following the reading of this book.

There are times when you have to take a step back and observe your surroundings. What is happening around you? Sometimes you’re not aware of the things, things that might be harmful to you or put you in a position that is not any more pleasant. After reading “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work”, I decided to make a big change in my life.

They realized that the way things have been going in an uncontrollable direction, and these side projects of theirs were becoming more and more like full-time jobs.

For the last one year, I’m struggling to maintain my side projects. I feel like I’m burnt out. Maybe I am and I wasn’t aware of it? I’m not sure … One thing that I’m sure is, I’m not happy how my day to day life is evolving around me.

Working on a side project is fun until it becomes your second full-time job.

Their projects were beginning to gain popularity, and as a result the work needed for the projects increased as well. They went onto talk about how the tempo has become unsustainable.

What if I said to you, that you have to spend 10-20 hours per week, outside of your day job just so you can maintain these projects? How scalable and feasible is this tempo? Every single day, when I open my e-mail, I pray that I don’t receive yet another Github email. Pull requests, issues, feedbacks, fixes, etc.. you name it. I can no longer maintain this tempo and I think it’s insane when I continue doing it. Economically, it doesn’t make any sense anymore (not just in terms of money, also in terms of well being).

Fatih then goes onto talk about handing off one of the projects thy were most proud of, vim-go, and how rough it was. Fortunately, they had someone they trusted, and had worked with in the past, to hand the project off to. However, for many of their projects it wasn’t that easy to find someone to hand the projects over to…

Also beginning today, I’ll be sunsetting most of my popular Go projects and packages. I will go over them for the last time, archive the repos and will be no longer maintaining them.

They sunsetted 11 of their projects, hoping that people from the community would fork the projects if need be.

My hope is that some people from the community will fork these projects if the time comes and people will switch over it.

While they did drop a lot of projects, there were still a few that they decided to keep maintaining. They described that they were in a “sleep mode.”

These will be maintained, which I call in “sleep mode”. So if a pull request comes in or if someone opens an issue, I might go over only for serious issues (i.e: it doesn’t work with latest Go version). However, things like feature additions will be only checked whenever I have time.

Now they has a lot more free time to enjoy life once again.

Now that I took over my free time, I can do whatever I want, play more with my son and just hang out all day, without doing a single thing. The weekends belong to me, and I can spend it very differently. I no longer have to worry about the last opened pull request’s to vim-go or my other Go projects anymore. It just feels so refreshing, it feels liberating!