Burnout is made worse when you take on too many complex interactions and dependencies. OSS works best when it’s a small project that does a single thing and do

Burnout is made worse when you take on too many complex interactions and dependencies. OSS works best when it’s a small project that does a single thing and does it well, but doesn’t rely on too many upstream projects for its functionality. As soon as the project tries to do too much, it virtually needs a committee to coordinate it all. If it relies on too many upstream dependencies, then the maintainer will be hammered with complaints that “this doesn’t work with version 1.45 of foolib… fix it!”. But a project that just lives in its own little world, doing its own little job? It’s something you can just maintain and improve at your leisure.