I am the blocker.
I finally rounded up some motivation and got the servers migrated to a publishing commons.
I wont be using the blog anymore to relay infrastructure updates or technical changes on any projects.
I have to admit, looking back, I’ve been stalled for over a year now in a massive and unprecedented exhaustion of motivation to work on these kinds of things.
That’s really my Achilles’ heel. My one notable characteristic has always been an endless reserve of inspiration and a deeply ingrained resistance to having that motivation impacted by external events or parties.
My lack of motivation lately on these projects isn’t external. It’s internal, and that’s never happened before.
What’s happened?
Well, first my grandmother died.
Then my great grandfather, her father died.
Then my Dad died.
Then I had to push the family through a grueling probate process.
One of my dear friends had a life altering stroke.
I woke up one day and looked at some of the folks whose disputes fuel some of these projects and realized that I had, at some point, allowed a little sliver of their brokenness in character to sift through my filters and internalized some of their worldviews on some level.
I have grown so tired of the broken, the ugly, their animus; the justice-defying nature of certain kinds of humans in general. For so long, behind my raging against the poison in the Linux community was a masked negotiation process where I was looking for a light inside them to see and work with, and I’ve come to realize it isn’t there. I’ve never been the crusader against the night, I’ve been trying to bring on a dawn. You can’t fix specific broken people. You can influence their environment to create pressure to shape them — you are part of their environment — that’s really about all you can do. You can change their incentives. You can influence movers in their environment. You can create roadblocks to the things that reward their behaviour or thinking in alot of cases. But you can’t change specific people. You can also make where your environments overlap facilitate a place where better people are formed and rewarded for better behaviours and worldviews. Nothing more.
All of this, and, I’ve been distracted with more physical and social things. I hired a personal trainer to get me back in shape, and that dude is getting me cut. It has been a surprisingly awesome investment, getting some of my 20s body back.
The puppy I got has grown up to be a great looking, gigantic and clumsy doggie who is excited about everything and runs from room to room like it’s a race. I couldn’t ask for better.
My awesome condo is still awesome.
My espresso machine still makes a better latte than Starbucks.
I was finally able to take my hiatus starting in October. Even with the break I still cleared six digits. Instead of studying systems design and building out these projects further I’ve spent that time so far focusing on my general well being and recovering from a rough couple of years.
My inspiration is coming back in spurts and splats but I’m not getting a steady stream again, yet.
The plan currently is to start moving all project documentation to wiki.silogroup.org for all projects and start a more formal SDLC and architectural lifecycle where the artifacts of those processes are defined there and hosted in a more professional manner. Perhaps the familiar structure will reignite my embers.