Indie Web Burnout

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Burn out is a real problem in the tech industry. It happens to the best of us. Whether it is at work, or at home. It happens. And we have to wade through it to get to the other side.

I've been working on a rebuild of this website in Astro, using Decap as a CMS to remove the friction of having to write blog posts at my PC or a machine that I have the codebase on. I became wholly consumed by it, but I really underestimated the work needed to port everything over. The blog posts were the easy bit. Having to convert all my experiments from Nunjucks to Astro has not been a walk in the park. And up to a point, I was really enjoying the challenge and chance to change what I had built up over the last few years.

But that energy has somewhat dissipated. That energy loss aligns with a change at my work - we had a few people leave my team, and projects got shuffled about. We're currently a bit under-resourced for all our projects and an ongoing contract that we have to meet. Project managers are having to fight to the death over an hour of my time.

It leaves me finding other outlets to be creative, so that I'm not coding 24/7. For a while, I was sitting with the self-inflicted guilt of this. I felt I was abandoning the Indie Web space, a place that had given me energy in times gone by. But I have since worked through that: it's a hobby, not an obligation. People have still come and gone, and left messages in my guestbook to leave their mark (thank you!). That's the joy of this space, it doesn't disappear, like a post on a Facebook timeline, it persists, and will still be there when I feel the spark again to pick it back up.

I'm not fighting the burn out, I'm acknowledging it. And maybe just picking up(?) the keyboard to type this out again will help massage that energy back into place.

Who knows.

I will be back at some point. At some point, I'll finish the rebuild and this moment will be a distant memory.

But feeling bad for burn out isn't going to get me anywhere but deeper in it, so for now, lovely people, see you around :)