On Losing the Thread

The hardest thing about building an open source app is staying connected to your own work. Issues pile up, and slowly, you become a prisoner of your own issue tracker. You stop opening your app to use it and start opening it to fix it. At some point maker becomes maintainer, and those are not the same thing.

I noticed the shift when I realized I hadn’t actually used Wealthfolio as a user in weeks. I was only opening it in dev mode. My relationship with the app went from something personal, a tool I was sharpening, to something administrative. A queue I was managing. I lost touch with my own work.

There’s a failure mode that looks like productivity. You’re closing issues. You’re shipping fixes. From the outside, the project is thriving. But you stop building an opinionated piece of software you’re attached to. You’re reacting. The issue tracker has become a to-do list that other people write for you, and for solo founders this hits harder because there’s no one else to absorb the noise.

When ten people use your app, you build what you want. When ten thousand people use it, you start building what the loudest voices want. Those are almost never the same thing. Success feels like losing ownership of your own taste. Saying yes is easy. Living with yes is the hard part.

I started rushing features. Shipping things that worked but that I hadn’t lived with yet. Just to close an issue. Just to move the number down. The whole reason I started this project was to build something I’d want to use with joy for many years. You don’t get there by sprinting through a backlog. And fighting the rush to ship new features is a hell of a fight, especially now when you can just ask an AI to implement something and have it done in an hour.

The nicest things I’ve built in Wealthfolio came from a personal connection to the feature. No open issue pushing me. No deadline. Just me noticing things and polishing again and again until I was happy with it.

That kind of noticing only comes from living in your own software. That’s the thread. That’s what I almost lost, and what I need to keep making room for.

I don’t think maintainers burn out from writing code. They burn out from the distance between what they want to build and what everyone else wants them to build. My fix isn’t to ignore users. Their feedback is valuable and constantly reminds me how little I know about this domain. But I’m also a user, the first one, and I need to protect the time and space that lets me build from that place.