Be the Tortoise
November 1st, 2007 by HenI talked the other day about how to beget activity and the important gift of hope that your activity gives to the community. I think one of the thing that holds people back from stepping up is time. Driving the life of a project is a lot of work, lots of issues to deal with, lots of commits, lots of bug reports. It all takes a lot of time. How are you ever going to find the time?
You’ve become the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. Running around measuring time and panicking. The reality is that you don’t have to. Instead of our leporine friend, picture the Tortoise. One steady step after another. Slowly does it.
Work on one issue a week, or one each month, or one every other night. Whatever you can find time for. Carve out a small piece of time, on a recurring basis, and try to knock off an issue each time. Most Open Source is developed in punctured equilibriums - long periods of bugger all happening, and then a short scurrying around of ratlike development before the silence descends again. If you can set up a steady heartbeat for your project, the number of rabbit development bursts from others will increase, they pick up hope from your monotone and squeak now and again. Before you know it you’ll be posting mails to the dev@ list to point out the last few remaining hard issues and suggesting that it might be time for a release.
I’ve no proof, but I suspect that tortoises have a lot less heart attacks than the rabbits. In developer terms - they burn out less. Plod… plod… plod…