Exhaustion
Tags:I feel like I’ve always had a tornado inside me. You have one inside you. Just sometimes it doesn’t move.
After trying Ruby for the first time in 2003 and starting to actively participate in the community since 2006, I have been organizationally involved in the Ruby community since February 2008, the month in which I got my moderator badge for rubyforen.de. We were talking about the “new” Rails 2.0 then.
Since then, I wrote 4800 posts on the bulletin board, got involved in organizing smaller events, ran 3 conferences, joined the core team of Padrino and worked with the Ruby Berlin e.V. to improve communication between organizers of community events in Germany. I also spoke on a number of events, from Europe over Japan to Argentina, either on Lightning Talks or on the main track. The Ruby community was always a welcoming place and supported all these endeavours with great generosity.
eurucamp 2013 is over and most of the exhaustion should have worn of by now. Sadly, it hasn’t. Instead, I have the growing feeling that I lost a bit of focus on myself. There are quite a few personal errands I left unfinished while running up for this year’s event. Looking at the number of things I have in my head that I wanted to organize this autumn, I’ve come to the following conclusion: either I take a hard break now or I will end up with a number of unfinished projects I don’t have the energy to bring to an end.
This is why I am ending my community involvements effectively now and will not start working on anything new. This mostly means:
- I retired as a Padrino core member
- I will, at this time, not be involved in the planning of eurucamp 2014, if there should be one
- My tiny planned projects for the Ruby Berlin e.V. will be put on hold
- The eurucamp hackdays are discontinued, unless someone wants to pick them up
- A few unannounced events will get the axe
I will still run the elasticsearch UG Berlin, but I am not sure whether I will revive my other UGs as planned. I will also do some final wrapup for eurucamp 2013, most of all overseeing the video postproduction. I will keep my moderator- and commit-bit for most of the things I am in, it doesn’t hurt and I have no intention of vanishing.
I am sorry if anyone had hopes on my future community work. If you are interested in taking some stuff over, contact me. This is in no means a goodbye, I just need to invest some time into myself at the moment.
Still, I will try to work on this blog more and hopefully grow it into something interesting for you.
Maybe the tornado will start moving again.