Grumble Grumble

By Andrew Smith

I’ve been running my more-or-less regular backup of littlesvr.ca, and found that yet again the online APNG assembler data directory is the one taking most of the time. Turns out that even though I cleared it a few months ago there is over 4GB of PNG files in there (half of that – 5800 APNG files).

That’s really interesting – it means APNG usage has actually grown in the last year. Partly that might be explained by ongoing support in Firefox, but surely that’s not the only explanation. I don’t know what’s really driving the growth. I just know it isn’t me.

On the one hand it’s great that people took over (e.g. Max Stepin has been diligently maintaining the APNG patch for well over a year now) but on the other hand it’s sad that the project survived without me – I guess I wasn’t that important :)

I have been feeling sad about such things lately. I always do my best to bootstrap a project and then pass it on to someone else to maintain. This way I can keep doing new and exciting things while expanding the breadth of my knowledge and skills, and increasing the impact I have overall. But damn it’s depressing when I’m in between projects. I feel useless – not wanted and not needed.

Should I just accept that there is only so much one can do in a lifetime, and specialise in some irrelevant field? Become normal? What a dreadful thought.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 2:32 and is filed under Open Source, Safe For Seneca. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.