Taking a month off from OSS volunteering
For me it was very stressful to learn how to cope with that, and fortunately I&#x27;m paid at least to do the bulk of the work I do (that is, all the work on Redis is paid). However once you learn the mental attitude to have towards this issues, they disappear magically. It&#x27;s you VS many people, and as the user base increases, there is <i>no way</i> you can handle issues and PRs. The contributors need to adapt in order to make your work as simple as possible, otherwise their issues&#x2F;PRs will get ignored. I personally cherry-pick among the ones that are easy to read, understand, general. There is always who will say, don&#x27;t you feel ashamed?!!11 Redis has tons of open PRs &#x2F; Issues! When people tell you this, always focus on what you did of good and not on what you can&#x27;t do well enough. In case of unpaied OSS work, the attitude should be to do it only to <i>have fun</i> and <i>learn</i>. There are no other justifications: IMHO it&#x27;s very wrong to donate time to OSS like if it was a charity, OSS is used by companies doing tons of money and startups that sold for <i>billions</i>. Nobody cared about redistributing back money to authors of the OSS that permitted them to create (alonside with their great product) this result, so you as an OSS maintainer should only care to have fun.<p>EDIT: I think it is very important to outline how in my experience 99% of the user base is <i>wonderful</i>, splendid human being, nice, willing to help. It&#x27;s just that the wrong 1% is very verbal and if you focus on that one is terrible, but I believe it is hard to find an environment like the &quot;Underground IT&#x2F;OSS&quot; scene from the POV of people quality. It&#x27;s just that&#x27;s impossible to get zero-assholes-environments.<p>EDIT 2: To other OSS maintainers, a trick is to be super gentle with harsh people. You&#x27;ll feel much, much better compared to using their own tones.