2020 Reflections

Who?

Project: crates.io,

Date: 2020

Why?

In a series of tweets reflecting the past year (2020), Sage Griffin talks about what caused them to disengage from open source. To begin, they mention that they came into 2020 on the edge of burnout due to lack of financial support.

I came into the year teetering on the edge of burnout. Getting funding to work on OSS full time is difficult, and the lack of stable income had put a constant source of stress that was slowly eating away at my core.

They were also raising a kid at the time, which didn’t help with the stress. With the pandemic which resulted in them having to pull their kid out from daycare. There wasn’t enough time to do everything they needed to do.

Having a kid home all day during a pandemic is unbelievably tiring. It’s not just taking care of them. There’s nowhere to take them to do stuff. You’re the only person they have to play with. I couldn’t do that and everything else

By summertime they felt comfortable enough putting their kid back into daycare, but it still wasn’t enough.

I was too exhausted by that point to try to pick back up my open source responsibilities.

Then we had another spike in cases, and they mentioned how they had to once again take their kid out of daycare. They decided that this would be about the time to finally step down.

At that point I just needed to stop feeling guilty for the work I wasn’t doing and stepped down from my positions on the crates and infra teams for Rust. It felt like shit to have to do it.

In the end, they mentioned how they might try to go back to OSS but the full time OSS ship has sailed, and it’s no longer feasible to them.

I am going to try to get back into OSS contributions at some point, but I don’t think I’ll ever try to do it full time again. I’m just not cut out for it, and this year has crushed me to a point that I just don’t think I can ever get back on that horse.

Interventions

One of the biggest issues that Sage mentioned is the lack of financial support. They wanted to work OSS full time, but the lack of funding was hurting those motivations. When they had found some possible sources, the pandemic decided to throw everything up in the air. Choosing between a stable source of income and potential funding for their open source work, they decided to stick with the stable income. Reflecting back on all of this, Sage mentions how a foundation could have changed a lot.

I think if the foundation had existed at the time it would have helped a lot.