Hello friends,
Back in January, I wrote an ambitious blog post detailing my plans for 2022. It included a list of planned free features, the introduction of paid features, and of course my overarching goal of open-sourcing the project in a coherent way.
What it didn't include was two major milestones in my personal life in 2022:
In February, I moved into the house my wife and I have been renovating for the past several years. The process of both packing and unpacking have consumed more of my attention than I'd anticipated, and even today, my time and workspace aren't compatible with the extended periods of focused development that I previously enjoyed. Effectively, I haven't touched code since mid-January.
In July, we will be welcoming a new human into the world! I'm proud and excited, and look forward to taking parental leave from my not-exactly-work to focus on being the best dad I can be.
Updated roadmap
I had hoped to have enough uninterrupted time before July to wrap up my milestones, but that hasn't been the case so far and it doesn't show any signs of changing in the immediate future. I will still work in some development time alongside my other responsibilities, but I'm not sure that in the coming months I'll be able to do much of the full-time focused work that has brought us to the place where we are now.
With that in mind, I'm making open-sourcing the project my top priority. I won't be able to do so as coherently as I'd like or from as completed a state as I'd like, but that is the one goal that I absolutely want to realize this year. The updated process for that will be:
Revert the half-completed macro work, which does more to obfuscate the code than to simplify it in its incomplete state.
Add and publish proper in-code documentation.
Update the GitHub issues to be understandable to people who are not me.
The future
I don't plan to return to initiative.sh on a full-time basis. It has always been my goal to get the project to a reasonably feature-complete state and then shift my development focus to something else.
However, I will continue to be an active project maintainer, reviewing and merging pull requests throughout my parental leave and resuming some ongoing time investment as my parental commitments become less all-consuming.
Finally, as I've noted before, I designed the project from the ground up to require no ongoing work on my part to keep it online. There are no servers to go down, no software updates to install, minimal hosting costs. What you see today will always be available, regardless of what other commitments and distractions arise in the future for me.
Thank you as always for your support along this journey. My primary goal when I quit my job a year and a half ago was to rediscover the love of building new things, and that has been far more successful than I'd dared to hope. I love this project, I'm proud of what I've accomplished, and I look forward to what we can achieve together in the future.