Where is Chris Graham ?

I've tried to be very open in letting people know that my free time has collapsed and give some sense of direction for the project and myself but sadly my optimism for getting my free time again keeps being ill-founded. Even while ignoring Composr for months (with great pain and regret), I still can't even clear my personal TODO lists of stuff that is truly urgent .

Right now I am still recovering from surgery, my health had failed badly and I had to have 5 procedures done on my nose to stop me having regular headaches and dizziness. I am feeling much better, but I lost a time to sickness, then prepping for the surgery, and then recovering from it.

I've given 17 years putting out this product for free, but I have no obligations, especially now that ocProducts is not taking on new work and has no active contracts. People should not depend on me for anything, and anyone asynchronously putting themselves in a position of doing so is definitely making a mistake. I would like to take on an active role again, but I'm not in any position to in this stage of my life regretfully. There are always other options than relying on me. This is the perfect time for the community to really establish itself as something where people help each other, rather than depending on any one person. There certainly is an enormous amount of technical documentation that should have obviated the need for people to go through me many many years ago. In hindsight, my long-standing desire to help largely has probably stopped others from stepping up.

Numerous people message me to try and get me to look at stuff or so on. As a rule I don't reply to this kind of thing if my reply would just be "Sorry I don't have time". The reason is that I know from vast experience the great majority of times it just makes things worse, as then I get replies back saying "Can you just do this though", followed by various "and"s - and all those justs require putting myself carefully in someone else's context, which usually takes hours. It makes me feel very guilty with every request for engagement that I cannot meet, and saying "no" again often causes more offence than not replying in the first place - so I just don't because I know I can't.

To give some background to how we got here, from the start Composr (well, ocPortal) was set up to be a sustainable consumer-orientated product, unlike other Open Source which follows a 'bazaar' model. Part of this is we would provide paid technical support at a rate lower than other companies would charge, and this would allow us to keep being involved developing the software for free to a high standard. However, sadly that part of the business model never really worked. 99% of people would not pay. And that's fine, that's people's personal choices and financial constraints - it's on me for not understanding people well enough to create a workable business model. Developer salaries went up making delegation impossible in this commercial context, and my free time crashed down once I started a family and bought a house and lost my health. Eventually I got to a point where I couldn't even pay my family's bills from what I made on client projects (which I could only give a percentage of my working hours to), so I had to take a silicon valley job which is paying me about 5x what I was able to earn through the massive responsibilities I took on running ocProducts (which obviously is good for me and my family now, but also rather depressing).

Regardless of all those struggles, I was still able to keep an Open Source product maintained to a commercial consumer-orientated standard for 17 years, which says something. We will have to move to a bazaar model too, but we have that legacy to build on at least.

Eventually I will have the free time again to push the project forward, but I will never have the number of hours I had before because my new day job has to take priority, along with my new family.

Okay, I've just spent about 45 minutes trying to articulate this properly, which is really a considerable time investment for me at the moment. I really want people not to be in the dark. A big bugbear of mine is people disappearing from projects without any openness around it. I think it's for the greater good to be fully open, even if it risks some people looking at me and the project like a cautionary tale .

Chris, you did an amazing job. You did something that few others could do. We can't predict what the future holds. We make the best decisions we can, and we make them with hope for the best outcomes. If I could make a short movie, it'd be about how life is so free and wild, regardless of our expectations. It's a really weird time. Roll with the punches. Never allow people to pressure you. Always be yourself. Take a break, once in a while, and reassess what's important to you. Don't be afraid to take a stand on things that are important to you. There's no such thing as failure...this is a sentiment that people impose on us. This is a tough one...but...most people are users, not creators. When people put pressure on you, remember that. But I work for minimum wage at a gas/petrol station...what do I know. God bless, Chris. With your software, you literally changed people's lives for the better. Facts. Return when it's the right time.

 

Thank you Malatesa.

I think I may have some more time finally. Thanks to the wonders of TaskRabbit and my silicon-valley megabucks I can now outsource a good proportion of my personal chores and I have caught up on most of the stuff I can't outsource 👍. I also have a fresh perspective on many things.

The year has been a challenge to say the least. I also lost a parent to cancer around the time all my life upheaval was happening, so I wasn't in the lightest of moods as I'm sure people can imagine.