Knowing when to back off a project…

A couple of years ago I created the original code behind project Django Queue Service on a bet with myself at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. A few months later I popped the whole thing up on Google Code hosting and made it an open source project. A couple of fellows joined me in hacking on the code base to move it forward a bit – and one in particular (Rajesh) did an amazing amount of work moving the whole thing forward.

While I had some good original ideas, I didn’t keep the project moving. And the project has been effectively abandoned from my head for the past 9 months. So today I’ve moved ownership of that project to Rajesh. I’ve left myself as a contributor – but I’ve found that unless I’m actively using the code myself, I’m not likely to do anything to contribute into the code base – and right now the Django based work I’m doing is all pretty external to needing any queues to get stuff done.

I think I likely should have handed the project off some time ago – I didn’t do it any favors by just lurking on the code and not promoting it. I didn’t hold up any patches either – I just didn’t make it move forward. I think the project’s in good hands and I’m looking forward to watching the “really simple queue” space to see where it continues to go. There are some interesting alternatives out there too – Gearman, Celery (rides atop RabbitMQ), and beanstalkd.