Don’t let the title scare you; I’m not going anywhere in particular. But the last ~year has seen a couple of big changes that I wanted to briefly share.

Just a quick note that there is now a roadmap section on my projects page. I’ll be linking to this from the project websites ASAP.

My hope is that this goes a small way towards addressing the thing where my reduced cadence makes it look like projects are “dead” when they’re actually just sleeping (cue Monty Python parrot reference here).

If you haven’t heard by now, the Freenode IRC network is under new, bad, management. I’m locking my channels there and will be registering my project names over on Libera.Chat.

Long story short: I’m finally starting to drop Python 2 (and a few slightly older Python 3s) from my projects, in a phased manner. Background and details follow.

A quick followup to my previous missive.

The first step

is admitting you have a problem; so with that in mind:

Hi. My name’s Jeff, I maintain several OSS projects you may be familiar with¹, and I’m burned out.

I lie awake at night, unable to sleep, crippled by guilt. During the day, it’s anxiety and fear that cripple instead, making the thought of facing the issue tracker unbearable.

Development on my projects has slowed far more than I ever intended, and while I have excuses², push has clearly come to shove. Something must change.

It took (much) longer than anticipated, for a number of reasons, and like any good .0 release it’ll take a few minor releases to really get up to speed – but it’s here! Fabric 2.0.0 is now out on PyPI, along with the project that does much of the heavy lifting, Invoke 1.0.0.

Please see the upgrade documentation for the gory details, and if you like, read on for some non-instructive reflection on the occasion.

Opening remarks

This has been a hard blog post to write; not in a technical sense (though blogging always is - it’s why I don’t do more of it!) but simply because Fabric 2 has been “coming soon” for what feels like ages, and putting it out in the open turns out to involve a lot of emotions.

But here we are: Fabric 2 is no longer private!

Being picky

As mentioned in my 2015 round-up post, I’ve been trying to make ends meet, re: open source plus a paying job. In March, I parted ways with a bunch of great people to take time off¹ and embark on a job hunt.

My goal was to find a company that could dedicate time to upstream maintenance, used my projects heavily in production, or both:

• Without a clear split between “internal” and “external” development time, prioritization becomes a tug of war leaving both sides unhappy. (And verbal agreements can get lost when organizations reshuffle.)
• Only by using one’s own projects can a developer truly internalize use cases and encounter edge cases. Development in a vacuum isn’t great.
• A role lacking one of these is problematic; one with neither – regardless of how awesome it would normally be – can make OSS unsustainable.

Work found

Despite my tight focus, I’ve had many great conversations with amazing hiring managers – often, after grilling whichever friend or contact initially reached out. Thanks to all of you!

After some difficult decision-making, I’m happy to say I’ve found a role filling both of my criteria! My new employer:

• uses Fabric to manage thousands of servers, giving me an excellent source of real-world problems to drive development;
• is giving me 1 day/week for pure upstream development;
• has plans for a new, interesting-to-an-ops-guy platform that I’ll help architect and develop.

I start at mLab – the world’s leading MongoDB hosting company – tomorrow.

For some time now, plans to switch Paramiko’s crypto backend from PyCrypto to PyCA’s Cryptography have been in motion. (Sometimes, slow-motion. Sorry.) These efforts are drawing to a close, and because they represent a nontrivial change in install dependencies – even though there aren’t any public API changes – we’re going to call the result Paramiko 2.0.