Taking my work private

After a few weeks of mulling, I've decided to start doing more of my work in private, and drop most of my obligations with open source projects I maintain or contribute to.

I thought about writing in depth about this, but will try to keep it short. A good enough summary is that, for myself and a lot of people, working "in public" is motivated by a need to feel validated, and I don't think that's a healthy reason to do things in my free time.

Validation is good in small doses - but social media has gamified feel good feedback loops to a level that's extremely addicting. Recently it's all started to feel vain and self-serving, and while in the past I could claim that it's related to my career now I don't think that's the case at all.

So, I'm taking myself private. I'm going to block social media, turn off projects, and resign from a few community obligations I have. Now I'm in this funny head space where I think that specifically listing out everything I'm changing will also be wrong - what a hole I've dug myself into!

Anyway, I'll still be posting blogs when I have something big to share (I have no engagement or analytics here), but you'll probably be hearing less from me going forward.

Cheers!