My renewal request for a free Resharper license for use with open source software projects came up this week. Resharper is a thing that helps you refactor code in Visual Studio, and it's a fantastic tool. If you maintain an open source project, like POP Forums, you can request a free license to use maintaining that project. Though I would gladly buy the software anyway (it really is that essential), I was a little concerned that they may not approve me, because my commit history graph for open source projects in the last year, or at least in recent months, has not exactly been robust. I haven't been writing code for fun much.
Some of this is certainly my day job. When I switched in November, I was writing a ton of code for work, up from zero in the last project I had in my previous position. On top of that, I was also hiring (a process that finally ended in early June). Going into heads-down coding mode, for me at least, gets to be mentally exhausting, and I was doing that while trying to build a team and develop a long-term blueprint. I'm not complaining, because this is exactly the responsibility I was looking for in a job, but throw in the challenges of parenting and having a home life and there aren't a lot of brain cycles left over. Coding for fun fell off the list.
The last official release of POP Forums was in February 2015, more than two years ago. After that, I began the slow transition to .NET Core, which was kind of a mess for the better part of those two years because of constant changes in tooling and project files and "missing" stuff to handle some of the things I needed, like sending email and resizing images. By last fall, I technically had a working solution, but no documentation, so I could have done a release then. Instead, I started to work on some of the scaleability features I wanted, and I even did some load testing. I could confidently handle 500 requests per second, which is absurdly high for anything that I do.
I want to really look at it, evolve it into something modern, but it doesn't feel like it's in a place to start that process. There are still a ton of unit tests not ported to the .NET Core version. At the very least, what I should be doing, is running it on my own sites. For better or worse, .NET Core has been out for more than a year and only my blog is running on it. It might be years before I can realistically use .NET Core at work, but I don't want to get left behind.
A lot of this is just decision paralysis, and also an irrational desire to make it easy to use the forum as a package in any app. I need to get out of that mode.
I also need to just prioritize differently. I want to spend more time on this, but I simply don't choose to.
No comments yet.