Thanks burntsushi for this and all your work on FOSS. There's one thing that I'd be interested to hear about that's not in the blog post -- stuff to do with how your FOSS involvement and your professional life impact each other. Ultimately it's zero-sum: 24hrs in a day. Do you often find you much prefer working on your side-projects than on your day job? Do you think you'd be a more productive / more engaged / deeper contributor in your day job if it weren't for the side projects? Or is it more that your love of software would suffer if it weren't for the side projects and hence you'd actually be a worse employee? Perhaps those three sentences are bit facile, but hopefully the question is clear.
Good question. I don't want to dig too deep into it, but at this point in time, I really enjoy the diversity. The stuff I do at work and the stuff I do in FOSS are fairly different and exercise different portions of my brain. I think I fundamentally enjoy having that difference, although it's hard to say for sure.
Even just restricting in to FOSS, I will often oscillate between different projects in order to keep things fresh and avoid burning out. For example, almost a year ago, I started working on a rewrite of one of my Rust libraries. I hit a thorny problem and my motivation waned, so I moved on to something else. I've just recently moved back to continue my rewrite, now almost a year later, with renewed vigor.
