The project has grown by a sizeable amount and as such also the Discord. While this makes it less comfortable to me, it shows that this is the right approach to a new VCS.

On the other hand, it was a strange year for me in the project, as judging by the Testimonials page which I added to the docs made me a "Developer" (thankfully no Maintainer yet). I see myself as a fine technical contributor, but my social skills sometimes are not the best and mixing that with strong opinions is a dangerous concoction.

The Bad (aka making mistakes)

During early Spring this year, I made some mistakes and was a undoubtely a bad contributor to the project.

• It started with my giant fuckup¹. And as I believe actions should have consequences, this led to a very personal offer to @martinvonz and the formation of a Governance structure.
• Then the whole prev/next debacle also wasn't great to continue that streak, where once again my strong words did not help anyone. I believe that my reactions there were toxic.
• And to top it off, the whole hook discussion also strained me heavily. Here I am thankful for the private conversation I had with Matt (@msta).

All of these interactions were not beneficial to me, or my mental state which led to the reoccurring thought of just resigning from the project. While this solves the immediate issue, it doesn't remove my interest in project itself and I think keeping me around as a person with some strong opinions can help the project grow further. And as I owe everyone the jj run implementation, it is hard to disappear into shadows.

After taking a healthy break this summer, my attitude finally improved towards the project and I got my motivation back to work on jj.

The Good

I was motivated to continue my work on run after taking a break. Hopefully it is in a MVP state now. Then Matt (@msta) started the initial work on jj api which won't be finished any time soon, as it will need to grow with the project.

Then we also went ahead and renamed Jujutsu's branches to bookmarks, which opens the path for Topics and solidifies it as our first term (although a similarily named but different mechanism exists for Mercurial).

Looking forward in the Project

My personal goal for the next year is to finish jj run and give others some room with it, I think both @hooper and @arxanas can improve it.

The things I really want to get in for next year is Topics, where I also was heavily involved and get the ball rolling on interchanging Change-IDs in the Git protocol and the start of some kind of native repository/server to begin modeling the world from Jujutsu's eyes, as importing terms from Git never helped the project.

I also want the more powerful aliases, so we can deprecate jj commit and make it a configurable alias for those who want to stick to the 30 years of VCS history.

On the docs side, I still want to completly restructure them when Steve Klabnik's tutorial lands. As they're a bit incoherent.

Conclusion

This was the year of communication failure, both in the project and at $WORK, where my frustration from work clearly affected my behavior in the project, which definitely wasn't what I wanted. I also will stick around for now, although always keeping a self-ban in mind.

I've also really tried to improve on my communication which is something I intend to keep up for next year (I expect occassional relapses, but such is life).