The roads I take...

I haven't been blogging much recently, but it's time to change that - like multiple things in my life that are changing right now.

I'll start with the most important piece first: My contract with Mozilla is ending in a week.

I had been accumulating frustration with pieces of my role that were founded in somewhat tedious routine like the whack-a-mole on crash spikes which was not very rewarding as well as never really giving time to breath and then overworking myself trying to get the needed success experiences in things like building dashboards and digging into data (which I really liked).
Being very passionate about Mozilla's Mission and Manifesto and identifying with the goals of my role I could for years paper over this frustration and fatigue but it kept building up in the background until it started impairing my strongest skill: communication with other people.

So, we had to call an end to this particular project - a role like this is never "finished", but it's also far from "failed" as I accomplished quite a bit over those 5 years, in various variants of the role.

After some cooldown and getting this out of my system, I'm happy to take on a new role of project management, possibly combined with some data analysis, somewhere, hopefully in an innovative area that aligns with my interests and possibly my passion for people being in control of their own lives.

As for Mozilla, no matter if an opportunity for work comes up there, I will surely stay around in the community, as I was before - after all, I still believe in the project and our mission and expect to continue to do so.

In other project management news, I just successfully finished the project of taking over my new condo and move in within a week. It took quite some coordination and planning beforehand, being prepared for last-minute changes, communicating well with all the different involved people and making informed but swift decisions at times - and it worked out perfectly. Sure, to put it into IT terms, there are still a few "bugs" left (some already fixed) and there's still a lot of followup work to do (need more furniture etc.) but the project "shipped" on time.

I'm looking forward to doing the same for future work projects, wherever they will manifest.

Note: This entry is getting a bit personal - but there aren't only technical aspects of my Mozilla and SeaMonkey work, there's a flipside of the coin... somewhere.

Lately, I'm feeling more grumpy than usually, annoyed about every comment that makes m work more difficult or that causes me additional work - even more, if someone plainly suggests that I should do something. On the other hand, I feel like way too little is moving forward and questioning if all the efforts are worth it at all, especially as I fail to get much joy out of small achieved steps nowadays.
I sometimes have a hard time concentrating on work, and every little bit of "music" bass coming from other rooms in this house or trampling around of the girl living in the room above mine drives me crazy.
Instead of seeing ongoing changes in Mozilla as challenges for our project and looking for ways to master them, I get the impression of big problems coming up, roadblocks being (intentionally?) placed in our way and start doubting if this project and me trying to drive it is a good idea at all.
Frustration is a constant companion instead of a sporadic visitor in my life.

This could be attributed to my apparent failure in relationships, and it's right that in the short times where I have such relationships the symptoms seem to fade a bit, but then, I refuse to go that easy way to blame everything in life on that. I had my times where I tried that, and those resulted in realizing that this couldn't be the whole truth and tends to solve nothing at all.

The only way to deal with that part is to hope for the best - and I drilled myself for never ever giving up hope and always believing in the good and positive things in life, no matter how bad things look at times. I convinced myself that the future will always be better so there's always a reason to move on.

Still, this lately looks more like a desperate effort of keeping control of this mess I call a life than like a shining star to follow - even if I wouldn't ever lose that core belief even for a second.

The more I think about it, the more this all looks to me like some form of (starting?) burnout, and my average of 50-60 working hours a week (up to 80 at times), practical absence of a personal life as well as the complete lack of physical exercise seems to support that argument, after all, being stressed and strained is nothing unknown to me.

Still, the problem is what to do against this. Taking some time off sounds like a good idea, but there's not so much I want to do other than work on this project. And then, we badly need progress, someone (me) being absent for a while would be missing. Sure, handing off some work to others might be good, if I only knew where all those others that have too little to do are.
Maybe seeing the SeaMonkey 2 Alpha forming and actually getting ready to ship would enjoy me enough to fill up my energy reserves.
I feel I probably need to continue to walk the line between doing as much work as I'd like and breaking down with a burnout for a while, and I currently don't actually see clearly how to get away from the constantly being on edge that comes with that.

Perhaps those two weeks in California that I'm counting down to can ease that situation a bit. I surely hope for that.