Lucius Phifollen @_sharpLimefox@octodon.social

Our admin has great technical knowledge and took care of a lot of background stuff. He worked on game stat balancing and gave us directions to add/rework mods. He did a good job, but failed at keeping the project active by keeping his role as unique bottleneck of our development cycle even when he showed up only once a month.

I guess that's all I have to say about all of that for tonight. Maybe I'll join another FOSS project in the near future, but I don't know right now.

Second sidenote: I now realise, after a lot of introspective work, that a lot of things weren't right with that project. It did end up making me mentally unable to code for, like, a *year* or so, when all the frustration and emotions and other stuff came crashing onto me.

The only thing I could begin to code after that was my school project for this year and for the first time I felt that spark again where I could create out of my imagination and be amazed when things ran like I wanted them to.

That's why I now know two important aspects of building a team : trust and structure.
Trust your developers, especially in small teams. Sure, a single line can break the server, but if someone's been working for three years, losing sleep to help your prod run, they probably won't mess you up. It's still fine to put in place checkpoints but then I get onto the second point : don't set up a single bottle neck that could very well cease to operate. Set up multiple trusted reviewers, not just you.

Sidenote on how that game mod server was organized : the admin acted as a great monitor and organizer (which is fair enough) but also the only bottleneck in the development process. Even after 3 years of working together with the team, the only person he entrusted with limited access to the VPS simply needed to develop an online player platform (which was never deployed). In the end, all the devs left the project because our code simply wasn't getting reviewed by him and merged any more.

I was furious at them. Why? Because they had been pinged a dozen of times on IRC about it, showed up when I wasn't there and didn't notice, then days later finally merged into prod for another reason altogether. It felt like the efforts I put into pulling those old outdated modded servers from oblivion were worthless.
I'm very much waiting for that project to die now. I don't want to work on something when my response to an urgent situation is ignored and end users suffer as a result.

Is it okay to be upset at a vital project member for not being there enough any more?
Recently I've been playing on a game server I use to mod for and I now understand why I stopped.
Case study: Last month the server kept crashing. A miscoded mob attack sequence would crash the server ever time we encountered one. It took me ten minutes to push the fix. It took about as many days for the admin to show up and put everything into prod despite the frequent daily crashes.

In 9th grade, as part of a thing for orientation, I got to see developers talk about their job. One of them gave an odd advice : "Find hobbies outside of l.T.".
Now I know they were right, even though it took me going through 2 phases of coding so much I couldn't do it any more.