Why I am quitting Drupal

As a developer and heavy Drupal user and advocate I have, over the past year, been maintaining several Drupal modules and got more involved in Drupal development. Recent events - some of them on here - have led me to re-assess my priorities and subsequently quit Drupal development. All of which is probably of minor interest to you but I feel the need to express my feelings and explain how the events and attitudes I've encountered have brought me to this point. Some people might see a bit of their own lives in it; others will probably just see yet another burn-out programmer. This post is quite long so I'll start with a brief summary.

In September, I spent an unbelievable number of hours developing a new and -- as I see it -- much needed Drupal module to manage Friends and relationships. I intended to use the module for Free Software Magazine's web site (I own and run FSM), and benefit the Drupal community as a whole. On the 3rd of September I needed a module to manage user relationships, to replicate what happens on Facebook. I discovered that there was no real module in Drupal to do that, and that the existing stuff didn't seem worth rescuing. As a seasoned Drupal programmer, I wrote a new module with good code, good API, and good support. Sadly the project met significant opposition here. In particular from two users: Morbus tried to kill the project on the grounds it was a duplicate, and Michelle claimed that _all_ it did was create "confusion in an already confused landscape" (although she argues she never used the word "all"). So my efforts were met with criticism and attack.

On October the 10th, the module was basically finished but the nature of discourse with these two had managed to kill not only any enthusiasm I had towards this module, but towards Drupal itself, and programming in general. I started hanging out in the forums less and less. I stopped going on IRC. My brain grew more resistant to Drupal-related emails and issues. At the same time, my Internet addiction diminished. When I woke up, the urge to check my emails, close issues, get features done, and so on lessened. The sites I would normally visit every morning as soon as I woke up became less important. My need to have an "empty inbox" became less marked. I was less addicted to the Internet. I should say that during this time some new - and subsequently very important - people entered my personal life and so added to the draw away from the Internet and my PC.

As of now I am no longer a Drupal developer. I won't abandon my modules and projects outright; I will keep on fixing bugs, for example. However, I won't develop new features for my modules. Instead, I will be available to new developers who want to join the Drupal projects, and give them training and advice while they develop new features. Teaching is one of the things I will never tire of, and will be my next contribution to the Drupal community. I hope this will help create more developers, and will keep the modules I developed alive and active but as of now I have re-assessed my priorities.

# The detailed version of the story

Going back to early September, my search for a module to mark other users as friends (or fans, or whatever) turned up three possibilities: "Friend", a very big module which incorporated all sorts of functionalities into a big monolithic structure; Buddylist2, which was supposedly being ported to Drupal 6 but that didn't seem to be happening; and User Relationships which looked promising. User Relationships seemed to be the only reasonable choice but it turned out the maintainer had abandoned it months earlier. In the end, it looked like he was not interested in continuing development of the module. I downloaded it, and discovered it had a difficult codebase; a database structure that raised my eyebrows; sparse documentation; and an API I simply didn't agree on.

That's when I made the mistake every programmer makes even after 15 years of practice and experience. I uttered the magical sentence: "You know what? This could be a simple 500 line module... I'll just code it". At this point some of you may be wondering why I didn't apply to become a maintainer of User Relationships and work on a new branch of it. The answer is simple: because I was aiming to do something completely different, and I wasn't sure I could have provided an upgrade path for the existing users of User Relationships. In fact, I wasn't even sure I was going to succeed in writing those 500 lines of code (I can see some of you are already smiling).

I started a new project. I called it "FriendList". I locked myself into a room, instructed somebody to bring me food, and stayed in there for 2.5 days, with my sciatic nerve asking for mercy (courtesy of too much classical ballet, I can only assume). By the end of it, the module was done. It was about 2300 lines of code and I felt sore, but happy. It worked, beautifully. Then I announced it.

Whilst I was locked in the room; the ex-maintainer of User Relationships wrote a clear post about not wanting to maintain it anymore. And, somebody else, Alex.K, decided to take it over. This is in itself a very laudable thing to do. Picking up from somebody else's work is hard. He didn't seem to think that the module was _that_ bad (while I did, and I still do), and he was very familiar with it.

Ironically enough, the attempted murder of FriendList happened in the "issue queue" of User Relationships about transfer of ownership (http://drupal.org/node/300859). Since the discussion was going on there, and I was subscribed, and since I had good working code, I thought I would make them aware that there was now something else that was probably worth considering. Morbus Iff didn't sound at all convinced by my efforts; even worse, he wouldn't even look at the source code: "Merc: I have to ask you to stop suggesting that we look at your source code. The onus of 'proof' is on you, not us". A few posts later, he suggested they would unpublish my module as "duplicate": "I think we should bring greggles into this. If alex.k and Merc can't come to an agreement then, to me, it looks like alex.k becomes maintainer of UR (as intended), and friendlist is unpublished as a duplicate effort".

That's when I became angry. Really angry. And it's when I _completely_ changed my attitude towards Drupal and its development - an attitude that, unfortunately, I haven't been able to revert since.

As it turns out, Morbus Iff was mistaken: projects are not unpublished, even when duplicates. While Drupal.org strongly recommends joining forces (http://drupal.org/node/23789), in the end duplicates are left unaddressed, it's a matter of survival of the fittest (or the best project). This is something I can see the rationale behind and it's the nature of free software development. It allows the "best" modules to rise to the surface and there's no need for anybody to kill anything. If Morbus Iff was able to kill 2500 lines of well constructed code _without even reading the source code_, I can see the potential for a lot of damage to the Drupal project as a whole, even by well-meaning people. If it were up to him, FriendList would have been given no chance to compete and some users could have missed out on a choice.

That said, I had a backup plan. If FriendList were to be unpublished, I would have simply added it to Drigg's CVS account as "Drigg's own relation management system". Users after a few months would have found it, and would have probably install Drigg just so that they could get that module. But that would have hardly been a good way to go about it. One fork too far perhaps.

The drama continued when I clashed with Michelle, a well respected member of the Drupal community, focusing on Social Networking. She manages a project which is a list of recommended modules so that Drupal becomes a fantastic system for social networking. My first thought was: "I need to make sure she sees FriendList; and do my best so that she likes it as much as I do".

Things started going really badly after a short while, when she said more than once "_All_ you did was add confusion to an already messed up situation". (In a later discussion, she claimed she never used the word "all"). There is a personal clash here. There are some things I don't condone in life and in other people. They include ingratitude, and disrespect towards other people's work. To me, she did exactly that. I would have been fine if she has said "Your module is better/worse/whatever, but it does add confusion to an already messy situation". But writing off my work like that was just a really, really bad move if she wanted to be on my side.

You can read part of the argument between Michelle and myself at http://groups.drupal.org/node/15508 which is where, as they say, the manure hit the fan. It's definitely not "the Drupal community at its best".

One thing that bothered my for some time afterwards was when Michelle said "You kept emailing me and bothering me on IRC, implying that I was ungrateful and incompetent and I've since found out that you've insulted other people I respect as well." I'll admit I was not at my most pleasant in IRC. I definitely _said_ that I felt she was ungrateful. Incompetent? I don't know, I haven't studied her code. What I do know, is that I didn't "keep emailing her". The only email I sent her after the open disagreement reads like this:

> IRC Merc: Anyway, Gratitude and proper understanding of what I do will change my attitude. Just a hint. See ya later.
> IRC Michelle: Guess the attitude is staying
>
> I don't expect everybody to have the technical skills to gain proper understanding on technical matters like "when a rewrite is better", and I don't expect everybody to know about gratitude.
> But I hope you realise that the attitude is a reaction to your actions and words.

That's the extent of the email communication and I wouldn't describe it as "kept on emailing". And yes, I was _fuming_ when I wrote it. As for the people she respects that I insulted I guess that's Morbus Iff, since he's the only other person I had a clash with. What hurt the most, and had the most impact, was being described as some soft of email stalker who went around insulting her and her mates. I expressed some doubt in their skills, but I don't see that as insulting. If you dismiss my work without ever looking at its code and API quality, its documentation, its structure, then I _will_ doubt your technical skills. That's how it is. If you find that insulting, then I'm sorry but honestly there are far worse things that are bandied about which are not considered insulting.

At this stage, Michelle and I seem to tolerate each other. But one thing keeps nagging me: while I apologised, because I recognised that I _could_ have sounded offensive (or at least excessively harsh, which is definitely more likely), there has been no reciprocation. Not apologising (without a "but") goes hand in hand with "ingratitude" and "disrespect towards other people's work" for me. It tells me a lot about the person.

Having said all that, in the end, I have to thank Morbus Iff and Michelle because they were absolutely instrumental in my personal growth and the rescheduling of priorities. I won't abandon the projects outright. I will keep on fixing bugs, for sure. However, I won't develop new features for my modules. Instead, I will be available to new developers who want to join the Drupal projects, and give them training and advice while they develop new features. Teaching is one of the things I will never tire of, and will be my next contribution to the Drupal community. I hope this will help create more developers, and will keep the modules I developed alive and active. What I call the "Drupal Saga" was really intense. However, it was also absolutely necessary in order for me to slowly get over my Internet and Work addiction.

I do have to thank some very amazing people that made this final part of my Drupal journey remarkably less bumpy. The first one is Marius. He basically made the modules possible. Without his help, today there would be no FriendList. I am not saying this to give him undue credit. It's the absolute truth. Every time I was on the verge of just giving up, he would come up with something amazing, and encouraged me to finish the job properly. Another person I have to thank is Webchick. She made sure that my chauvinistic brain was gracefully reminded that there are amazing women out there who are just so smart, compassionate, and dedicated... My respect for her is immense -- and so is my gratitude, for her reminding me that prejudice based on gender (or in fact anything else) is wrong and dangerous. And finally, well, I have to thank Dries. His work on Drupal has been amazing on many levels. His skin is obviously much thicker than mine, and that alone says something about the man. Rock on Dries!

# No longer a workaholic?

There's another part to my decision to leave Drupal. Until October, I was a workaholic and an Internet addict. I worked an average of 12 hours a day, and didn't know what a week-end was. I would have breaks that lasted a few weeks every couple of years, but that was pretty much it. My work was on the internet. I woke up with an immense need to check my email and empty my inbox. I would also read 10 news sites, and just wouldn't feel at peace with myself until I had done that. Worse was that there was nothing in my life to compete with this addiction. I worked online. The Internet and the work addiction fed each other. As soon as a new project came along, I would just right into it. I was able to complete projects that would normally take a small team of people... completely on my own.

I wish I could explain why Michelle and Morbus -- and the events in general -- triggered this important step in what I called my "recovery". While entangled in my workaholic spiral, I looked online -- and offline -- for counseling and general help. I never went very far. Those people who tried to help me by being supportive and generally nice... failed. In the end two people who have become very dear to me and who had no desire to help me managed to do so -- immensely -- without even realising it. They're not Drupal people and they're not even within my Internet "network" but they were what I needed when I needed it. Thank you, Bronson my brother. Thank you Ginny, my love. This is not the right place to talk about them, but they know exactly what I am talking about -- and that's all that matters.

# Where to from here?

At the moment, I am working about 4 hours a day. I am slowly building up to about 5 or 6 hours a day, and am avoiding carefully touching my computer on week ends. A lot of work this way just doesn't get done, but that's totally fine -- work is there to be _worked on_, and not to be _obsessively completed_. This is something I learned by... letting things build up, while watching my anxiety levels go up -- and then slowly go down again as my brain realised that there was no going back.

I will soon start the process of handing my modules over to somebody else. Somebody who has that spark and that desire to develop some exciting modules for Drupal. somebody who, hopefully, won't get hit by ingratitude or high-school like mocking and bullying.

Thanks for taking the time to get this far and...

Bye.

Merc