Today I made one of the hardest decisions I’ve made in a while. I decided to give up maintainership of two projects that I originally started. The projects are pypuppetdb, a library to talk to the PuppetDB API, and Puppetboard, a dashboard for PuppetDB that leverages pypuppetdb.
Both projects started two years ago during my time at Nedap. The existing open source dashboards for Puppet sort of sucked and none of them were using PuppetDB so we were storing lots of duplicate data and in an inefficient manner too.
Upon release both projects got some traction. Though the amount of contributions have been limited a lot of people have reached out to tell me they run Puppetboard and are very happy with it. This always made me smile and was one of the main reasons I kept pushing forward with the project.
I have commitments to many open source projects and with my recent move I no longer really had a reason to continue development on both projects from a professional need. From a personal perspective, I don’t run Puppet at home any more so I need to make that much more of an effort to find reasons to work on them and get excited about them.
As such I’ve decided to ask the community to take over. I’ve been spinning this idea in my mind since the beginning of 2015 but it scared me. They’re my projects and part of who am I, at least within the Puppet community, is “the Puppetboard guy”. Having worked on both projects for so long and build them also gives you a strong feel of attachment and responsibility. Did I really want someone else to decide the future direction of both? On the other hand, do I really want to spend my 10%/hack days on maintaining two projects I don’t really feel like working on any more?
Being my first true open source projects I feel very attached to them, sort of parental and protective of them. But truth be told I haven’t been treating both projects as good as I should have. In the end it’s about making the grown up decision and let go. As much as I feel like I’m putting my child up for adoption, it deserves better than what I can do for it now.
The question now becomes, who am I? In a way I’m still the Puppetboard guy but not really. So if I don’t work on this any more, then what? Do I stop working on Puppet things? The answer there is no. I have a lot of things that I’d still like to build and tie into the configuration management space. This just gives me more space to try something new, fresh ideas. Something to get excited about all over again.
What the next thing is going to be I don’t know just yet, but if anything it will be fun to do!