Safe as Milk

Learning to let go

February 11, 2014 8:03 pm Dave Neary General

There are times in a long career when you have to turn your back on what’s gone before. In work, this is easy. People stop giving you a paycheck, you stop turning up to work. And yet, some of my best friends are people I worked with 10 years ago.

In open source, it’s harder. You build relationships, you grow emotional attachments to projects you work on.

When life moves you on from a project, you stay subscribed to mailing lists, you add mail filters to move them to a folder you read less and less frequently.

When you hit a threshold where you no longer consider yourself a developer or contributor, you keep watching from afar, and when the project takes a direction you disagree with, that you know you would have argued against, you feel a little sadness.

After a while, this build-up of guilt weighs you down. But letting go is hard to do.

I’m learning. Trying to get better at letting go. The next generation needs to find their own way. It’s liberating and saddening in equal measure. Old friends: we will stay friends, but I need to trust you to make your own way.