Effective immediately, there will be no further feature development from me on Hypothesis for the foreseeable future.
This is not the end of Hypothesis. I will still be:
- Managing the Hypothesis community and answering peoples’ questions about how to use it
- Fixing bugs, although probably not even close to as rapidly as I have historically done
- Improving the documentation
- Giving talks about Hypothesis
- Reviewing and merging pull requests. If anyone else wants to do feature development on Hypothesis you are extremely welcome to and are more than welcome to ask me questions in the course of doing so.
Which is actually still quite a lot of work.
Hypothesis isn’t going anywhere. But, for now at least, 1.10 is as good as it’s going to get. This is now a side project, and you can expect a commensurate level of support. If you want more than that, or there’s some feature you desperately need, get in touch. We can talk rates.
At some point in the future I will doubtless resume feature development, but it won’t be soon.
Why?
Partly because Hypothesis 1.10 is good enough. It’s basically as good as or better than any open source equivalent in any language, and it’s certainly light years beyond what this time last year anyone in the Python community could reasonably expect would ever exist. There are exciting things I could work on, but they’d be another huge time sink and basically not all that helpful for the problem of making development on Hypothesis sustainable.
But mostly because I’m tired and I’m angry, and I’ve done a reality check and found reality wanting.
I’ve been trying to figure out a way of making Hypothesis development sustainable, and the answer is basically that I can’t, despite the fact that it’s clearly going to save people at the bare minimum millions of dollars over the course of its lifetime.
Yeah, I could probably eke out a living. Particularly if I was prepared to burn a lot of bridges and sacrifice most of what actually makes me want to work on it, but basically we’ve built an industry on free labour, and we’ve concluded that we’d much rather make people work for free in their spare time to produce adequate software and shame them into supporting it when somehow it surprisingly doesn’t do exactly what we want than fairly compensate for their labour and get good software out of it.
This makes any attempt to get money for tooling such an uphill struggle that it’s really not worth the effort. Plans which are predicated on changing the world before anyone will pay you any money are decidedly bad plans.
I think Hypothesis will make the world a better place, and I have a lot emotionally invested it, so as stated above I’m not abandoning it entirely, but I’ve really lost all desire to continue giving away so much of my labour for free, so I won’t.
There will be more on the subject of what happens next when I have collected my thoughts better and am slightly less angry.
In the short term though, if you’ve got any contracting work that you think would be up my alley and is either remote or reachable from London, that would be great.