How much is too much?

published on October 14, 2008

So, university has started again. We have to pick “broadening courses”, I chose economy courses (macroeconomics and operational research). In this semester, I’ve got 6 courses, all of which — except for one — come with their own project. The one that doesn’t have a project (macroeconomics) overlaps with other courses, because it’s a trimester course. Painful.

I’m also trying to convince my professors to be able to do my bachelor thesis on Drupal. By that I mean: develop something that can make Drupal shine in a certain area. (More on that in a later blog post!) That costs its fair share of time as well

So — I’m extremely busy for school; pulling late-nighters 7/7.

Next, I’m involved in too many projects outside of school: maintaining my Drupal modules (or at least trying to), table tennis, working for Mollom, working in the local AIESEC committee, maintaining DriverPacks.net, and more.

How much is too much? Well, this is too much for me. In reality, I’ve pretty much only been able to work on school stuff the past 3 weeks. So … to create some breathing room for me again, and because I haven’t been able to maintain them anyway, I’m giving the following modules away for adoption:

  • Carousel, supposed to become the single module for all carousel-goodness (which means it will include the jCarousel and Carousel panel style modules). Me, nor any of my comaintainers have had the time to really push this forward. Porting to Drupal 6 is super easy, patches are already in the issue queue.
  • Carousel panel style, title says it all. Not much work to maintain.
  • jCarousel, the jQuery plugin that makes creating carousels easy.
  • Money CCK Field, title says it all, supports all known currencies and advanced formatting. Not much work to maintain. Needs to be ported to CCK 2 (Drupal 6).
  • Tabs panel style, title says it all. Not much work to maintain.
  • Views Saved Searches, needs a couple minor features and needs to be ported to Views 2 (Drupal 6).

This means I’m giving up all my modules for adoption, except for AHAH Helper, CDN Integration and Hierarchical Select.
Let me know via the comments, my contact page or the issue queue if you’d like to become the maintainer of either of those modules.

Finally, I’ve upgraded my site a bit — which allowed me to provide you with a demo of Hierarchical Select 3! If you plan to use it, or have postponed trying it, you can do so now very easily!

Comments

Ju young Vanderwater's picture

Ju young Vanderwater

Wim - sounds like you’re getting your priorities rearranged! A little different in our shop, but we are also trying to focus on what we do best… Can’t be everything to everyone.

It was so good to meet you in Hungary - hope your prof will let you do a Drupal thesis! That sounds like an awesome topic. :)

Wim Leers's picture

Wim Leers

Hey Ju,

That’s exactly what I’m doing :)

It was great meeting you in Hungary as well ;) And thanks for the encouragement on the thesis, I can tell you that I’ll have more news on that topic soon …

Rob Loach's picture

Rob Loach

I have a list of people that I want to clone to have more time to do awesome stuff, and you’re on it!

Wim Leers's picture

Wim Leers

Thanks for the compliment, I feel honored :)

It’d be very handy for myself too if I cloning were an option! But I guess we’d need some sort of master-slave setup, and well, when you’ve got too many slaves, that won’t work very efficiently. Meh. :P

John Fiala's picture

John Fiala

I hear you - going to university and doing all that sounds like too much!

I’d forgotten that you’d put me on those Carousel modules - I need a little time to examine them, but at the moment I’m interested in picking up the slack and moving these forward.

Wim Leers's picture

Wim Leers

Thanks for your understanding and especially for moving these modules forward! :)

Dru-p's picture

Wim,

You need to look after yourself and your health first, otherwise the rest will fail.

IMHO … You probably are trying to achieve too much. I have some experience of this … I do the same thing!

If people really need HS on D6 etc etc earlier than you can produce it, then they can find a way. There are so many people ‘subscribed’ to the thread, including myself, something will get done if really needed that urgently.

Stand back, look after yourself, get your priority work done, take the pressure off … and keep the table tennis and AIESEC going!!

Good luck persuading your profs to allow a super Drupal site project and thanks for the great contributions you are making to Drupal.

Dru-p

Wim Leers's picture

Wim Leers

Thanks for the vote of confidence and the kudos :) AIESEC has been put on hold. Table tennis is (the only thing) still going on :)