I have decided today to terminate Hydra Cache project. What is Hydra Cache anyway?
About 2 and half years ago, a few of my friends and I, inspired by our experience with one of our client at that time and Amazon's Dynamo design, started an open source project to build a distributed elastic cache called Hydra Cache. However after the inception of this project I personally was involved in a number of startup business and open source projects, thus spreading myself too thin and even till today still only have the Hydra Cache project in a pre-release 1.0RC1 stage (although really close to be release ready).
Of course this slow development of a promising project only had myself to blame. When I was searching for the reason why I want to terminate the project despite it being so close to release, I had many answers such as competent alternative open source options (JBoss InfiniSpan) now available, but I think the most important reason is that I have lost my drive and obsession with this idea a long time ago. All the things I did after that point for one reason or another were not really helping the project but rather just me dragging my feet to admit the fate of the project. Nevertheless this project has taught me many lessons, both technical and non-technical, however most importantly after this experience I realized the best way to do an outstanding job with open source project is to do it with your passion and have fun. The moment you realize the flame of your passion is gone and you are no longer having fun with it, you should stop dragging it alone. Since we don't get to be paid for open source contribution, so if you are not having fun then why even bother :)
About 2 and half years ago, a few of my friends and I, inspired by our experience with one of our client at that time and Amazon's Dynamo design, started an open source project to build a distributed elastic cache called Hydra Cache. However after the inception of this project I personally was involved in a number of startup business and open source projects, thus spreading myself too thin and even till today still only have the Hydra Cache project in a pre-release 1.0RC1 stage (although really close to be release ready).
Of course this slow development of a promising project only had myself to blame. When I was searching for the reason why I want to terminate the project despite it being so close to release, I had many answers such as competent alternative open source options (JBoss InfiniSpan) now available, but I think the most important reason is that I have lost my drive and obsession with this idea a long time ago. All the things I did after that point for one reason or another were not really helping the project but rather just me dragging my feet to admit the fate of the project. Nevertheless this project has taught me many lessons, both technical and non-technical, however most importantly after this experience I realized the best way to do an outstanding job with open source project is to do it with your passion and have fun. The moment you realize the flame of your passion is gone and you are no longer having fun with it, you should stop dragging it alone. Since we don't get to be paid for open source contribution, so if you are not having fun then why even bother :)