Other commenters have mentioned how liberating the experience of solo development can be: the freedom from deadlines and constraints; the ability to translate a

Other commenters have mentioned how liberating the experience of solo development can be: the freedom from deadlines and constraints; the ability to translate a vision or goal into code quickly; the chance to step away from the project for days/weeks/months with no guilty feelings. For me, the greatest liberation has been to explore different approaches to established practices, uncover surprising ways to achieve various graphical effects, etc. But there's also a couple of downsides that I've encountered while solo-developing my canvas library: - Side tracking. It is really, really easy to get side-tracked into adding stuff to the library which doesn't need to be part of the library. For instance, I love the work I've done to add a coherent graphical filters system to the library - but it has also added a lot of lines of code. Similarly with the particle physics system: the results are very satisfying, but is it necessary? - Loneliness. While I love working on my library, the lack of a surrounding community of contributors and users can (occasionally) leave me questioning why I'm doing this work, who I'm doing it for. At the end of the day, if others don't find my library useful, then maybe I should have spent that time contributing to someone else's vision/project - what if my work is just me being selfish?