I need a time-out.

We are, rapidly, approaching the one-year anniversary of my initial announcement that I am starting the kongoni project. Today, I can look back at that year as an achievement, what was a vision has been realized into a released project with a solid and growing userbase. We’ve had an amazing hackfest where a lot of the core work toward our next release was done – and that was great.

However, 2.13.0 is going to be a little later than expected, in fact I won’t promise anything before early in 2010. The reason is very simple – right now,  I can’t work on it, there are other people working on their parts, but the big “put-it-all-together” task is going to have to be postponed. I have at the same time during this year gone through terrible emotional events. A divorce was just the start, and it’s been building up.
Right now, I’m clinically depressed, I have very little energy and my sleeping patterns have gone straight to hell, what energy I have needs to go into my dayjob – to keep the bills paid. I feel no shame about saying: my limits right now are reduced, I cannot perform at my usual level and I need to cut down a bit.
I need to get home, eat a healthy meal and go to bed at a reasonable hour. I need to focus on dealing with practical matters-of-life on a one-at-a-time basis, solving them and preventing them getting out of hand, and I need to take care of myself a bit.

I have been through depression before, I know my way out, this is not a permanent thing, nor is it regular, in fact I haven’t had full-on depression like this in nearly 5 years, my normal techniques for preventing it… well they just couldn’t keep up with the sheer amount of things to deal with in the last few weeks.

So, though it saddens me, I have to say – a fundamental reason why kongoni is not only non-proprietory but crucially non-commercial is this: I don’t do deadlines. Kongoni was set up this way, so that if somebody needs a time-out they can take it, so that it will always be fun – never work.
Right now, it’s not fun, because I simply don’t have the strength. In a few weeks or months, this will change – and I’ll be my old self, of this I’m fairly certain – in the meantime, I ask you to bear with my. My fellow coders, keep up on your side, if you think you can handle some of mine, please do ask – I’ll try to help you get started. To the users, I know you’re all anxiously waiting for Cicero,  and it will come, I will be back in the saddle as soon as I can.

But I don’t want to give you a rushed half-job, I want to give you the best next version I can – and that requires me to be the best I can be, and right now, I’m not.

So, for medical and personal reasons – I am taking a time-out from kongoni, for at least the next month or two. I will see where I stand in December and update you on when I expect to resume it (or perhaps that I already have).