The joys of unemployment

The silver lining of being laid off is time. Specifically, time to finish the pile of open source projects that have been sitting on the back burner for years, waiting for a weekend that never came.

I have been on drupal.org for almost twenty years. Eighteen and a half, as the profile counts it. Thirty-odd projects maintained or co-maintained, a stack of issue credits, twelve DrupalCons, and a stint organizing the front-end Drupal meetup in Portland and the Let’s contribute together meetup in Long Beach. That is most of a career expressed as one long contribution log.

But Drupal was never the whole of it. There is the Open edX work – getting a full platform to come up in Docker for both production and local development, which is harder than it sounds and matters more than it sounds. There is v, and webform relay, and a long tail of smaller things scattered across github.com/frob and gitlab.com/frob.

The other reason to do this now is that unemployment gives you a lot of time and not much to point at. A contribution graph that goes quiet the month you get laid off says something, and it is not the thing you want it to say. Staying busy in public keeps the work visible – commits, releases, issue queues. It is the portfolio that maintains itself, as long as you keep showing up to it.

None of these got the attention they needed while I had a full-time job. They are getting it now.