The future of TwitFix

TwitFix started as a fun project to help me and my friends get around an annoying bug. It was part of an ongoing series of random projects that I would polish as much as I cared to, as some much needed fluff to add to my very otherwise stark resume. I’ve never had formal education, and these kinds of projects were what I thought could be my ticket to finally finding a good job where I could do what I want, as an alternative to trying to go to college, something I have never been able to afford, until now

And TwitFix was the project that broke that ice, finally. The popularity and success of the project not only gained me many friends and support, and gave me some much needed confidence, it also worked as that final bit of polish I needed to stand out, and in October, I started working a job that has for me, always only been a dream and a distant one at that.

Coming up to nearly a year ago now, I took a big plunge, I started a gofundme, and started trying to raise money in order to leave where I was comfortable, but had no future, from a small town in Texas, to Chicago. TwitFix was in part a help in getting the word out there, and the donations I received from all of you very kind people are the only thing that got me here and kept me alive long enough to get that impossible job, which allowed me to get my own apartment, my own home, that I was responsible for, for the first time in my life. I spent years dreaming of independence and this project did a fuck of a lot to get me there

That makes this really hard. I have tried my hardest to continue to improve TwitFix, and I’ve spent hundreds of hours in tweaking, debugging, maintaining, and debugging, all because this is the first project that I’ve ever made that people genuinely got use out of, that people really seemed to enjoy, and thank me for, and that’s something else that I’ve strived for for as long as I’ve been writing software as a hobby, which has been since I was a kid

I’ve come in to a bout of depression, and burnout. I work 40 hour weeks, I get home at 6 tired, I a few hours a day at least looking at and tweaking twitfix, and then I have a couple hours to myself for whatever else I want to do, drawing, games, tv, and then I fall asleep at around 1 or 2, to wake up at 6:30 the next day. The weekends lately have seemed to revolve around running around setting out fires, or otherwise trying to communicate with either Twitter or Discord to try and negotiate better functionality to their APIs and platforms to try and improve the service, which is an almost entirely futile task 100% of the time, as they don’t really like to communicate, at all.

I am very tired. I want to have time to go to the park, or play a game, or go out with friends, or draw, or even work on other projects without constantly having to worry about something blowing up, or having to deal with the pit in my stomach I see when someone shares a link and an embed hangs, or to worry about the bugs that I Just Can Not fix due to everything being a hack and barely functioning anyways

I don’t want to shut down twitfix. I think I can just continue running the server for as long as it’s needed, maybe some day someone I know and trust who is reliable will come along and host a shard or a fork and I can sell them the domain and I can just get out from under it.

Nothing is really set in stone, other than I know that I’m Just Tired and Really Burnt Out. I’m not going to be taking any action today nor do I have any plans to explicitly shut it down without warning. if I do there will be at least a month or 2 of warning ahead of time.

Sorry if this lets everyone down, I just really need a break for a while!