A new approach to managing my personal projects (read: jMonkeyEngine)
I recently had a big change in my life (I’m the guy in the middle).
My first contributions to Discourse were purely out of love. A year in, I realised I could see myself doing this full time, and began making a more concerted effort to get hired. Starting with a couple paid assignments, I gradually got my foot far enough in the door that I felt comfortable floating the idea of:
“hey, how about you just hire me so I can do this stuff all the time?”.
Eventually I found myself completely on the other side of the door, which was promptly locked and bolted shut behind me:
and just so Jeff doesn’t get into trouble again…
Working for an open source project that I admire (and use!) has always been one of my foremost ambitions ever since I got involved with the open source movement through jMonkeyEngine. Now that I’m in it, I made a very scary realisation. See, Discourse has this thing about being “designed for the next 10 years of the Internet”
Look at any successful open source project, and you’ll see that it takes a while. And we’re OK with that. We’ve said from the beginning we are on a 10 year mission. In a few months we’ll be 3 years into that mission.
And you know what? I’m into it. As much as it scares me to say it out loud, I really wanna see those 10 years all the way through.
And yet, I feel a sting of sadness when I realise this path is not harmonious with another longstanding ambition of mine: Make a company centered around jMonkeyEngine. As far-fetched as it was, it never ceased to be real to me. Until now. At this point I can say with some certainty that I’m not gonna be the one to drive the next chapter of jMonkeyEngine forward. From here on out, to me, jME will remain a side project.
It’s time to distribute the torch
I’m not going anywhere. But I’ll be changing the way I spend my dwindling hobbyist hours. A lot of the things I’ve been (and planning to be-) doing for jME could be done by anyone. It’s just that no one wants to do all of it. So my plan is to reduce the bus factor of my role by doing a better job of documenting the various micro-jobs I’ve been doing for the project and making it easy for others to take them on with minimal friction.
Through Discourse I’m learning more every day about how to effectively run an open source business. In the coming year, I’ll be applying those lessons to jME in whichever way I can, with the end goal of having a self-sustainable open source project on our hands. (I’d still rather not get hit by a bus though.)
Here’s some stuff I wanna get to sooner rather than later.
Making friends with companies
jMonkeyEngine may not become my livelihood in the foreseeable future, but for many others it can be. For some it already is. I need to come up with more incentives for companies to get in touch with us, so they can help us help them (help us).
Paying for things
This is risky business, but I’ve had some experience with it now, and I think I can make it work. jME has received generous donations in days past that we didn’t even know what to do with, so we just sat on it. This isn’t good. All this time we essentially had a budget for taking small risks, but we hardly took any of them! That’s gonna change now.
Now that I’m working full time I’ll also be spending my own money on some jME micro-projects that I know will bring me joy.
Streamlined path-to-first-contribution
When someone wants to contribute to jME the path to making that first contribution is not crystal clear. We do an OK job of onboarding contributors, but we can do a whole lot better.
Onwards!
The specifics will continue to be discussed on the Hub.
Originally published at blog.erlend.sh on December 6, 2015.
