Forty Eight

Home

As I wrote last year, life at home has definitely settled into a routine that revolves around my kids and their activites. My son has his laser focus on soccer and my daughter swims and plays basketball. Each weekday is school, sports and then dinner together. Soccer games, swim meets and basketball games break up our weekends. It’s a good life together.

My wife and I get time together on the drive to and from the gym at 5AM MWF and at night after the kids go to bed. She is still amazing and keeps us organized in the controlled chaos that is our family schedule. I’m probably making it sound a bit crazier than it is in reality. But that’s likely because I tend to use any free time to make progress on task at work.

Work

I first want to say that I truly appreciate both my coworkers and our customers at FireGiant. They make the hard work worth it. Now on with the rest of it.

This last year at work was hard. It was frustrating, made me really angry and in the end was disappointing. It was a crescendo of the frustration I realized I’ve been writing about for three years now.

But they really came to a head in 2024.

1. I started the year rewriting significant chunks of Burn to successfully integate with .NET (not .NET Framework). The original design was fundamentally flawed because the .NET team did not buy into the whole solution. Ultimately, that was my fault because I wasn’t engaged enough in the feature’s initial development to see the flaw.

2. While working on that rewrite, multiple security vulnerabilities were reported against Burn. A couple of them were us working around bad behavior in Windows but others were just flat out problems in Burn we had to fix. On top of that, we had three versions of WiX to patch for each problem.

   We lost the first third of the year spending significant amounts of energy and making zero forward progress. These maintenance costs were completely out of control. This led to the final deprecation of WiX v3.

3. Complaints about the lack of WiX documentation spilled over from the community to FireGiant itself. Since the very early in WiX’s public development, I made it clear I saw non-reference documentation (tutorials, how-tos, etc) as an opportunity for the community to get involved in the project. Over time, it’s become increasingly clear that consumers expect Open Source projects to be fully documented without putting in any effort themselves. But it was when consumers started blaming FireGiant for the lack of documentation, that I decided change was required.

4. XZ Utils. The backdoor in XZ Utils broke me. The thread on Twitter went viral with over 1.2M Views, 6K likes and 1.5K retweets. Those numbers are astonishing (I don’t do viral content) but what truly stunned me was that everyone in the comments agreed that we needed to do something about Open Source sustainability (or whatever you want to call it). Over the months, the event faded away and everyone went back to the status quo. But it haunted me and I started developing my own solution.

Next

This year, I’ve written a lot about the frustration of being an Open Source maintainer. That’s because it took almost all of my “public facing” energy this year. And as I said last year, we’re working on a number of cool projects at FireGiant but until they are public, I won’t have much to say.

Plus the truth is, the cumulation of multiple years of frustration as an Open Source maintainer has led me to decisions with some important repercussions. You’ve already seen two of the decisions (WiX v3 deprecated, wixtoolet.org merged with the firegiant.com website refresh). The third decision is potentially much, much bigger. It will arrive very soon.

In the meantime, keep coding. You know I am!