Why I quit?
Or how I learnt to stop worrying, and love making things
A few weeks ago, I decided to quit the company I was working for. Everyone has been asking the same question:
“WHY? What was wrong with the company?!”
My answer: NOTHING.
I had a chance to work for a fast growing startup in London with a great team, great salary, a bright future ahead, good funding and cool challenges. But I decided to give all this up.
At some point I realised that my everyday job stopped making me happy — not because there was something wrong with it, but because I would wait until I was done with my normal work just to be able to get back to open source — which was more challenging for me and was something what would get me up every morning and made me happy.
What’s next
More than a year ago I began to use React; this was a few months after Facebook open sourced it. Primarily I used React for side projects; and at the time, it was very hard to persuade anyone in the company to use something so beta in production (even though Facebook had been using it internally for a good few years).
Because I was running into some issues with what I was trying to do with React, and no one in-office was using it, so couldn’t assist. I began looking for help somewhere else. I “met” Dan Abramov on Twitter. He helped me with a lot of the problems I was facing while building apps. I was inspired by his open source work, and from then on, I started contributing to different projects myself. Dan wasn’t the only one who influenced this decision. Another great example is Michael Jackson and Ryan Florence, who left their jobs to work on React Router and React Training.
Do what you love!
Fixing the issues other developers have with projects or even diving into a project itself, reading its source code, helps me to learn and it is something which I enjoy a lot. This got me to the point where I would wake up very early in the morning (around 3am) so I could still catch up with the guys from the US and do open source work before my day job.
“I’ve decided to dedicate all of my time to open source.”
It was not an easy decision to make, but: whenever I feel like I’m doing something only for the sake of doing it — and not because it makes me happy — it’s time for a change. I quit and I’ve decided to dedicate all of my time to open source. It seems crazy at first, mainly because it means that I won’t get paid at all and living in one of the most expensive cities (London) in the world won’t make it easier. But I managed to save some money so I should be fine for a while. The most important for me is that I do what I love and I am happy others can benefit from my work.
What I’m going to focus on
The main benefit for me for doing this is to learn more and to be challenged. There are a lot of open source projects and it might seem like it’s hard to decide. A few projects which seem interesting and challenging for me are:
- Rackt projects — mainly Redux (a predictable state container for JavaScript apps by Dan Abramov) and React Router (a complete routing library for React by Ryan Florence and Michael Jackson)
- Relay — a JavaScript framework for building data-driven React application by Facebook
- GraphQL — query language and execution engine tied to any backend service by Facebook
It does not mean that those are the only ones I’d like to contribute to. Although these are my main focus.
Community
React has a great community. I think the best place to find most of us is through Reactiflux on Slack or on Twitter. I highly encourage everyone to start contributing to open source projects. You can start with simple things, like fixing some typos in the docs — you don’t need to know the entire project to start contributing!
Thanks to Dan, Michael and Them Crooked Coders for helping with the review of this post.
