maintaining Folium

[Conengmo]

Hi guys,

You may have noticed I've been away for a bit. I find I don't have the time and mental space to focus on Folium. Which gives me guilt, because I feel like I let you down. Especially since you @hansthen have all these ideas on how to improve Folium. It want to properly collaborate on those, but I don't seem to find the mental clarity to do so. I also don't just want to sign off on them without actually looking at them, because I get anxiety about breaking things.

When maintaining Folium meant just keeping the lights on and ignoring feature requests, that was doable. But I have to be honest and say I don't think I'm up for improving it beyond where it is now. In both cases I think I'm not enjoying it as much as I was when I started around 8 years ago.

I'm not sure what the best way going forward is. I'd like to take a break if possible, but I also don't want to let the project go into disarray.

What do you both need to keep enjoying working on Folium? If my role is diminished, how does that impact you? And what could possibly remedy that?

Thanks for what you are both contributing to the open source community, it's quite amazing.

[hansthen]

Hey Frank, thanks for your openness.

I can totally understand how maintaining a project for eight years can start to feel like a chore.

I do have a lot of ideas on how to improve Folium. Folium is quirky sometimes. I hope my spouting ideas did not take away from your pleasure on working on Folium. Please don't feel guilty. I do appreciate your feedback and sometimes pushback. Some things I proposed are indeed developer curiosity that are not warranted by actual user demand. I also tend to ignore the risk of breaking other people's code. Your putting the breaks on my enthusiasm probably avoided a lot of issues.

Would it help you if I toned down on the major rewrite proposals for a while?

There are a lot of bug fixes and smaller feature requests with which to amuse myself. I'd also like to increase test coverage and perhaps also include the test suites of downstream packages such as geopandas or streamlit-folium. Perhaps this may give you more confidence that we do not introduce bugs when we do make changes.