For the burned out OSS maintainer

Intro

Let’s not kid ourselves. Open-Source can be a miserable place to work in. After a full work day random strangers expect you to perform at your best, for free, for them. And if you don’t, they will let you know.

There are many toxic social dynamics unique to Open-Source that can drain all energy from you.

But it’s not just the human factor. It’s also the technical challenges that can be overwhelming. Often you find yourselve facing the decision to either go to bed and get a healthy amount of sleep, or to stay up late and fix that bug, to read up on that API change that made your CI crash, to fix that issue that has been open for months, etc.

We are here for you!

Been there, done that, and more than once.

We know how it feels to see the burn-out coming, and we know how it feels when it finally catches up with you.

You are not alone!

There are no silver bullets. Leaving Open-Source is not the answer most of you are looking for. It’s not the answer we turned to in the past.
But there are things we can do together to make things better.
To make expectations clear: We don’t offer help maintaining your project. We don’t offer help with your technical problems beyond that what AF does in general. We don’t offer help with your personal problems.

All we offer is a place to talk about your situation with people who have the experience to really understand what you’re going through. We stand by our word that we will not share anything you tell us with anyone else.

So if this offer sounds interesting to you, please reach out to us as a group, or to David, Edgar, Florian, Jimmy individually. Whatever you feel most comfortable with.