Developer burn-out and addiction

Those of you that follow my twitter have likely noticed that I've become more hostile online. I'm frustrated and annoyed. I'm suffering developer burn-out. I've put in over 300 hours on TWRP 2 in the last 4 1/2 months. That's 20 hours a week, on top of my 40+ hours a week at my regular job. It was fun when I started, but Android is an addiction to me, and TWRP only makes that addiction worse. In 2011, I've spent over $4,000 on Android devices (not including accessories or phone/data plans). Recently, that addiction to porting onto new devices had me order a Galaxy Nexus, out of pocket. That probably tipped some of the stress, because instead of spending that money on my kids and wife for Christmas, I spent it on another Android device.

Four months ago, working on TWRP made me happy and helped me relax. It doesn't anymore. It's been in a crunch to get done since October, and as the hours add up, those are hours I'm not spending with family. Now, what makes me happy and helps me relax is playing with my kids and seeing them smile. But I'm always exhausted from the long hours of programming and debugging. And like everyone, Christmas is a strain on the finances, especially when I keep buying devices. So in an attempt to make up for it, I tried offering up a way of donating towards getting the software released for the device. That got ridiculed to the point where I pulled the plug on TWRP 2 on the Galaxy Nexus entirely, with my wife having the only copy of TWRP for the device.

Couple this with all the drama going on in the forums and on twitter. I'm going to be blunt to everyone. Shut the fuck up. I don't care. Really. I don't. You don't pay me to care, I don't care. If someone wants to beg for donations, more power to them. I don't care. I don't have much faith in the community as a whole, and that comes from being over on XDA and getting burned pretty heavily on my HDMI work. We received less than $500 in donations for that work which we gave away for free. The trolls in the forums were enough to make me leave XDA entirely. That means you, bradleyw801. Where was the community defending the developers who were giving away their shit for free then? Oh yeah, they were busy that day begging other developers for more free shit.

How many people are using TWRP 1.0 or 1.1 and have actually donated to the time that the developers put in to release it? But you think nothing of dropping $0.99 on a random app on the market which takes a fraction of the time to develop. Why do I have developer burn-out? Because I'm good developer. I care about the quality of my work. I care that people want the code I'm working on. And I just wish I could do this stuff for a living. But I can't. I have a family to support. I want TWRP to run on all devices, and I want people to be excited. But it's hard to be excited when I'm surrounded by politics, be it on Twitter, XDA, or even within TeamWin.

So where does this leave TWRP? Dees_troy is taking the lead on getting the devices which already work out the door while I back off and re-evaluate my reasons. My only obligation is to release TWRP 2 for the Epic Touch 4G, because RootzWiki was kind enough to provide me one just for porting. And I take that obligation seriously.