Tonight I feel quite depressed; I’m not sure myself why, I just can’t sleep.. I slept a few hours, but in the past weeks, every night was a bad dream, and every time I finally was able to wake up, it was a new salvation, and these few hours were also tense; I woke up, and I tried to focus my mind to stay awake as much as possible, even though I know it’s not good not to sleep. But I cannot sleep.
I suppose that one of the reasons I cannot sleep is that, well, I feel like I’m a total failure lately. Don’t get me wrong, I always knew I wasn’t a very good developer on many fields, but I’ve understood now that the only thing in my life as a free software developer that wasn’t a failure was Gentoo, where I was able to actually get something done, and somehow done right, but I resigned from there, and that means I made it into a failure even the only time I was going not to fail.
I think I have a special feeling for failing projects; NoX-Wizard started crumbling down when I’ve joined… and in a few months even Fabrizio, who was the admin of the project, gave up on it; I’ve been working on a CMS of my own, before the sprouting of CMS everywhere, it had quite a few edges, for what I could tell, things that were later implemented by more complex CMSes, but I was never able to release anything usable; ATMOSphere lasted just the time needed to get out of high school, and I wasn’t able to actually make it scale as a true working project. I blamed most of these failures to inexperience, but it doesn’t seem like getting more years of experience helped me on this. The most recent example is xine, which is a project that is going to fail unless the development flow is totally changed and new developers are brought on board, which is what me and the few developers left are trying to do, but it will take some time I’m afraid, and it’s also a high risk, as if we are not able to handle the switch correctly, the project will probably wither and die at the same time.
I’ve been able to provide patches here and there, but they are usually trivial fixes, or boring stuff that required just to be done, and nobody cared (not sure why, but I often ended up caught in doing those little things that everybody know are needed, but nobody wants to do, this since I joined my first UltimaOnLine shard, Dragons’ Land, and I was able in 24 hours to fix bugs standing there since months… nothing esoteric really, just a couple of fixes here and there… and at the end, that project died too). My projects are mostly dead or dying, I’m not even sure myself why sometimes.
Gitarella was promising, but then beside me not having time for updating it in a while, nobody else seemed interested in it. I received no feedback about it, and I don’t know of anybody actually running it, so I don’t know what to do with it. Rust got me one feedback (David’s), and I do hope it won’t die just yet – I just didn’t have time lately, but I will restart working on it tomorrow’s night).
I even chosen a dying software for my blog, as Typo doesn’t seem that much alive.
Ignorance is bliss
Now that I feel this way, I’m tempted to shut down Farragut, give back Prakesh to its owner (well, this I should probably do already now that I don’t have to care about Gentoo/FreeBSD), and sell away Enterprise.. then I could buy an iMac, and just use that for the rest of my life, without having to care about development anymore, without having to fail once again.
I’ve considered changing distribution, to cut the ties with Gentoo as much a I could, but I can’t really find anything that provides me with what I need, which first of all is a good multimedia support without patent-crap stuff (which rules out most of distributions already) and a vast selection of packages for development. I can’t really see myself using anything but Gentoo anymore, and this is driving me crazy because I have to stand here seeing stuff going kaput without being able to do anything to correct them.
I’m not sure what is letting me down so much, maybe it’s seeing the months spent on ALSA going down the toilet or maybe it’s the dreams that are upsetting me all too much. I should really reconsider my life, right now I feel like it’s being a total waste of chemical energy without anything good coming out of it.