Sorry everybody, I failed with you 😔

[pedronauck]

Hi everybody,
I really want to ask sorry to everyone and say that maybe I failed with the community, but has an explanation.

In the last year, I can't give any support here. I really know that there a lot of people using Docz as a dependency on a lot of projects and this was choking me a lot, every day that I spent without being able to work here was a painful moment for me. But unfortunately was hard times and I want to explain this to you.

When I had the idea to work on Docz I was working for a company here in Brazil and in order to develop it, I need to wake up every day 3 hours earlier and go to bed 3 hours later. So I worked a lot with full energy to create this project and was awesome, really awesome. I could have a lot of opportunities because of it, could change my work, start to work to other companies and was pretty good times.

But as the project grew, a lot of demand was appearing as well and that's the bad part of the journey. Without victimism, I need to be honest here: maintaining an open-source is something very hard, really hard. When the project starts to have a lot of people using it, it's more complicated yet. People want a lot of things from you and your project, big companies are using the project and need a lot of things as well from it in order to keep their projects healthy, but in most of the cases this is a talk in just one way. There are more people interest in have things from you, than help! And this crashed me 😕

So, after a time working a lot here and on my business, I was with my healthy compromised and needed to choose between "keep my open source project" or "keep my mental and physical health". And for me the choice was very clear, I choose me. This gave a very bad way to the project that stays without people to maintain it. For a long @rakannimer helped me a lot with this (thanks a lot for this), but unfortunately, after few months he couldn't help anymore and the projects stay on stand-by since this.

But... 😍 Now I'll try to put it back on the trails again.

Now I better and with time to spent and help the project to grow and be healthy again. So, if you want to help me on this journey, I really appreciate it and your help will be very useful.

For people that are still using Docz and have bugs and issues, I ask to be a little be patient. I'll do my best to update and fix all the things in the project, but maybe this could spent few weeks.

So, I think that is it, thanks a lot all people and again, sorry :)

[xobotyi]

Well, i know that feeling very well, maintaining popular open-source project, is very uplifting. But when self-confidence is all you gain - very soon you come to the moment when the weight of resposibility and community requests starts to push so hard, that the only exit is to delegate the porject or stop development at all.

Besides that - keep up the good work, the only thing this project lacks is an attention recent times.

[lizheming]

First thx for your hard working. I think this is a problem which most of open source project meets. Except ask for community help, the author may also have a calm down mentality. The reason you open the project just because of you need it and want it help more people. If you have not full time to maintain it, you just satisfy yourself. That's not all your fault and you needn't self-accusation. At last, congratulations your back and hope docz better and better.

[crutchcorn]

@pedronauck you haven't failed anyone. As you said, maintaining OSS is extremely difficult and often thankless.

If someone else wanted project behavior they should have either:

• Hired you
• Forked it
• Been patient

Remember that you (as an individual) always come first and that, if you need to, there's absolutely zero weakness in taking a step away in the future.

Wishing the best for you, you're bound to do incredible work inside docz and out 😊

[stuaxo]

At this scale, we (as open source developers and companies that rely on them) really need to have a way to help projects scale up without breaking their creators.

[KerimG]

I don't think you need to apologize for anything. It's a great tool made freely available, if someone wants to have it maintained and nobody is around, then they can pick it up or gtfo. You're a much kinder person than I am. It's just crazy to me that when people come up with cool software and make it open source for all to enjoy, there's some expectation of maintenance by the author.

If every single developer made even the most trivial contribution to the open source packages they use, we'd already have a base on Mars.

[smeijer]

I hope you feel better now! But just so you know, there is nothing to apologize for. You can't fail us, as you shared something awesome, for free. You don't get payed for it, so it's unfair of anyone to claim your time or have any expectations.

Open source is hard! Take your time. And don't work on anything that you don't enjoy. Life is too short for that. ❤️

[mfts]

Pedro thank you for sharing your pain and being honest. We don't need to pretend and always say we're "crushing it". Take all the time off you need.

I'm ready to help. I'll start by triaging some issues for you.

Much love and support ❤️

[pyrossh]

@pedronauck that's alright. Every open-source developer faces this problem of not having enough time and gets burnt out often and health is always a priority. Take care.

[molszanski]

@pedronauck you haven't failed anyone. Please take care of yourself first!
It takes a lot of courage to mediate ambition with reality publicly. Wish you all the best!

[alekssadowski95]

This is why the open source community shouldnt push so hard to make every project free. It should be ok to make your projekt open-source, closed-source, free or paid.

[sponnusa]

@pedronauck Take care of your health first.

It's something no else will be able to contribute to, but only you!

And, if a good one is there nothing is impossible! Take care.

[isubasinghe]

@pedronauck take care, you didn't fail anyone. We are failing you and the OSS community by not rewarding hard work that makes companies money.

[johnnyreilly]

You didn't fail @pedronauck - you did good and lovely things. Take care of yourself. You're the priority chap. Thank you for the work you have done. You don't need to do anymore.

[WriteCodeEveryday]

Sorry everybody, I failed with you 😔

You have done no such thing. You can't help anyone if you're dead from stress. Always be willing to walk away from a stressful situation, regroup and come back to it.

[hentaij666]

Hey no need to apologize. I just want to sincerely thank you for all of your hard work and sacrifice. I have a feeling things will improve as time goes on. Thank you and get some rest !!

[Inhibit]

Thank you for sharing your work! No one should expect more than what you're willing to give if they're not directly employing you.

Having access to what you open source licensed they can certainly pay someone or do the work they'd like themselves.

[rzr]

May you transfer this project to @abandonware org :

https://rzr.github.io/rzr-presentations/docs/abandonware

Any interest ? let me know I'll setup creds to relocate to this team

[happycube]

My advice is to finish whatever you want to add - if anything! - for yourself, fix whatever bugs/deficiencies you can, then set it aside and call it done.

Sometimes you just have to walk away from a painting and call it done, and hopefully be happy with it.

[erikbgithub]

A single person can stand, fall over, get bored, pissed off, sick, distracted or simply die. No fault there. Thanks for all your hard work, man!

The question for me is, why do you do this alone?

[instance01]

A single person can stand, fall over, get bored, pissed off, sick, distracted or simply die. No fault there. Thanks for all your hard work, man!

The question for me is, why do you do this alone?

It's not easy finding volunteers.

[erikbgithub]

It's not easy finding volunteers.

Curious. What's your story?

[FormerlyChucks]

I'd just like to thank you for your contributions to the open source community :)

[sunn-e]

Just came here to say, please do everything to avoid burnout. :)
Eat well and stay healthy. Congratulations on returning back. One step at a time.

[shlomi-noach]

Random maintainer chiming in to show support, take care of yourself!

[theletterf]

Docz is an awesome project. How can we help?

[armyofevilrobots]

Don't let your users push you into hurting yourself. If they aren't paying you, you don't owe them anything. It says VERY CLEARLY in the bold part of your license:

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS"

Companies benefiting off of your free labour also benefit from the unrealistic ideal that open-source project developers owe them timely bug-fixes and feature adds. Don't let that narrative drive you to burnout.

Thanks for what you do, but only do it if you're still enjoying it.

[sam0x17]

The companies using this project need to step up and contribute to it, either via actual code contributions or large monthly donations. For example at Arist (YC 'S20) we donate $1000/month to the Ruby on Jets project. This should be the norm when you rely on something heavily, especially when it's a small project.

[xeviknal]

Maintaining an open-source project is not serving a product/service. The source is open precisely for letting community contribute in any specific shape.

If you are in this position it is not because of you, it is because the paradigm or industry is a bit broken/misunderstood.

You have a roadmap, you schedule your time for issues and features. The rest of it, might wait or the community is more than welcome to propose an implementation.

Having an awesome repo like this is not something someone can start overnight.

I've seen some open-source projects which have guidelines for managing the governance. That might help!

[triwats]

We're evalutating an alternative to Confluence in house as ultimately developers don't want to repeat themselves and we want to review our documentation just like code to ensure quality in a remote world.

I evaluated Docz last week and really wanted to use it because of numerous awesome features, but it frankly seemed unstable and after reading the issues - unmaintained. Literally a week later and I'm seeing the reason why and feeling slightly guilty. We expect a lot from awesome open-source side projects - perhaps too much a lot of the time. I wonder if our modern consumerism lifestyles make this more severe.

I'm glad you're back, but go easy and keep well, as ultimately that's all we have.

[ryanbnl]

This is something you learn the hard way.

Don't work for free; if you want to work on pure OSS then try the Patreon route. Or go semi-commercial (if you can support a multi-person team). Your project looks successful, so you have your market validation. That's the big one.

[milkey-mouse]

It's awesome that you build software for the world to use, but remember: you don't owe us anything. Never feel guilty about not working in your free time. https://liberamanifesto.com/

[pedronauck]

Thanks, really appreciate the words of everyone 🙏🏻 This is priceless and gives a lot of energy and motivation to keep working here. I'll do my best to put the project back on trails again and all type of help is very welcome ❤️

[ErickWendel]

🤘🏻🤘🏻

[pedronauck]

Thank you to everyone that gives me help and support with words 😍🙏🏻

Thanks to you - after all shares and comments here - now I'm the second Brazilian to be part of the Github Sponsor Program and have the opportunity to keep doing the job and be supported here ❤️
👉🏻 https://github.com/sponsors/pedronauck

[gcjbr]

As a fellow Brazilian, I must say you should be proud of being alive and a bit sane. That's about the best we can manage in these dark times.

Times have been harsh for us here.

I don't use Docz, but reach out anytime you need help with maintaining it or just need to talk.

Cheers, man.

[feitian124]

OSS is some kind of giveness, you owe us nothing, and you have our respect .
thank you.

[morewings]

Thanks for good work, dude.

[trentlarson]

Hey, you've done a great work! I ran a website on docz a while ago, and now I'm migrating another one to markdown so I looked around at alternatives but I didn't find anything better so I'm going to use docz again. You've provided a very useful tool that is actually making other people's lives easier! You can tell by all the 37 other comments above. You should be very proud of your accomplishment... and yourself. You're a benefit to us all.

[jfhector]

Thanks for the great work. We've built our design system documentation site using Docz and it's been very helpful.

[drewlustro]

Is there significant advantage to mark the project as discontinued?

Docz hasn't seen an update in six months, and before that it had been a full year.

Not complaining, just pointing out to prevent future developers from adopting an unsupported system. Despite Docz's lack of development, its marketing website and documentation still look very slick, which is misleading.

[renatobenks]

Hey @drewlustro, we're actually still supporting docz, but towards a different way rather than only fixing bugs and closing issues, once most of its work is entirely related to past decisions over the last years since docz bornt. Therefore, as we don't have much time andcontributors (people/team) to quickly fix bugs as properly, we're working on them over next major version, within newer features. So, we're entirely depending on community contributors to do this job as we didn't find anyone yet to exclusively maintain docz in also v2.

By the way, we're about to release, between today, and tomorrow (I'm doing it right now), the release for a couple of last contributions that came up from the community. So hopefully, that metric will be a little bit better (:

We don't wanna drop off docz from being maintained, we're only trying to focus and finally give a better solution as whole. Either way, we're all open to feedback and/or suggestions, and most importantly, contributions and support, so feel free to reach out and have a chat.

[drewlustro]

Oh wow! Thank you for chiming in and many thanks for your work!

To be honest, I'd be happy to help with docz, but the project has appeared to be halfway through a monorepo migration for some time now.

Then, of course, you have the distinction between docz (standalone project) and gatsby theme. The latter is challenging to debug now that Gatsby is 1-2 major semver releases ahead.

Care to share light on the future of docz? I hope the team goes "all in" on a single vision, either gatsby theme or standalone, as that would simplify community contributions quite a bit!

Personally, I use the gatsby theme at my org because it is more extensible.

[TheMikeyRoss]

Don't worry about it brother. Nothing stays forever. Everything will vanish, except god.