Drawing from personal experience how open source can be a double-edged sword.

Denis Bolkovskis

Mental Health

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Contributing to open source comes with challenges and requires preparation. Open source projects can become products and authors need to find ways to sustain them financially. It's important to establish a healthy balance between open source and personal life.

The Dark Side of Open Source

Agree, if unmonitored open source projects can lead to burnout from overcommitment, strained work-life balance due to the blurred lines between personal interests and professional tasks.

“While the open-source community offers boundless opportunities for learning and collaboration, it’s crucial to prioritize mental health and maintain boundaries to prevent burnout.”
This is what I’ve learned from your post. Thank you so much ❤️

A very detailed research and analysis! Totally agreed on your views.

I have been authoring quite a lot of open-source for many years and I can say that sometimes I just don’t have any mood in me to code at all and issues can pile up for weeks and sometimes longer until I regain my willingness to work on them.
<a href="https://github.com/yairEO" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://github.com/yairEO</a>
It’s not that I have a bad mood or anything, just not the mood for programming. I have been programming for decades and I have many other non-computers-related interests and sometimes I feel like doing other stuff.
Some of my projects are quite awesome but I really dislike “running all over town” shouting &amp; yelling to promote them, and sadly they barely get exposure :(
It is very time-consuming to maintain open-source, especially the ones requires constant caring, and people expect me to answer/help them quickly.
The most discouraging thing for me is poorly-written issues. although I have a template for new issues, people sometimes seem to ignore it and not providing me with any minimal reproduceable demo of the problem, just a vague description. I do not want to spend triple the time creating a minimal demo which I can then debug.
Another thing would be very poor English or just barely understandable description for issues… I am not a CIA operative and have no time decipher what the hell a person just wrote me. Clarity is very important.
People don’t understand that for me to help them they first need to help me by supplying me with all the information I could possibly need first in relation to their problem/question. Many don’t do that.

No project, nothing, is more important than health!