Gnuxie & Draupnir: Burnout, Winter Wrap-Up 2026

• Lack of progress, discovery of complications.
• Loss of imagined future.
• Ecosystem changes and emergencies.
• Feeling unvalued.

• Long-term material insecurity.
• Committal to ambitious long-term ideas without method.
• Communication.
• Perceived competition and fragmentation.

Put simply I am really passionate about ideas that take a lot of work to implement, and what I lacked was the gap between realising them and making pragmatic increments towards them.

Thinking a lot about hard structural problems is really what my heart is tied to. To the extent that I feel like if I'm not working towards solving some big problem or gaining insight into one, then I question why.

This obviously biases what I choose to work on. And I think I simply lacked the planning knowledge to make incremental progress towards these goals in a tight loop. Which would not only help provide feedback emotionally, to a felling of progress, more quickly. And critically would minimise the strategic planning risk associated with long-term goals.

My experience with this specifically has changed my perspective on software engineering as a whole. And I've now captured my learnings in the Draupnir planning documentation which describes the process I'm now using².

A communal failure of the Matrix ecosystem is that projects are kept out of consideration or consultation about big changes to the protocol as a result of a preference to private channels of communication and work being the norm for an otherwise open foundation. And this is particularly true of communication between teams within the foundation, and also Element.

This has been improving, for example I've worked with the foundation's trust and safety team and they now very faithfully use the Matrix Safety Guild to coordinate with safety projects. But there's a lot of work to do in other places, specifically the SCT and governance of the foundation.

In the context of the specification, there still is a large amount of collusion between Element and the SCT when it comes to protocol changes, and it gives these proposals a lot of momentum before the rest of the ecosystem is consulted. These kinds of proposals are very hard to change because the design and decisions around the MSC have already been discussed and given the goahead by the organ that is supposed to be providing review. We really need to develop a consultation process that involves more than the SCT. The lack of consultation happened with Hydra phase 1, and is still happening with the other proposals³. None of this should be happening. There should be a culture of collaboration, openness, and consultation from Element and the foundation the first place⁴.

In the context of foundation governance specifically, foundation staff (or anyone who has foundation work delegated to them) should treat the idea of working in the open as an opportunity to delegate some of their own work to volunteers, and also document processes. But I can't help but receive the impression that this is seen as high risk and a waste of time. It's an impression, I don't know if it is the case, but if it were it would obviously be entirely inappropriate. Because this work is actually essential to any organisation that is faithful to open source and open governance.

I encourage anyone reading this to consider how they can do more work in the open so that not only can others carry on where you leave off but can actually help you achieve the goals you set when you took on the role.

All of the factors we are discussing here obviously put me in a position of insecurity. And this led me to see parallel efforts as competition. A lot of the time I even saw them as a statement that my work was inadaquate, and even felt like the people behind them were insulting me. And obviously this meant things were not ok, but at least I could recognise that. Seeing other projects have activity while I was in a smoldering heap played on my mind when viewed from this lens, and it was really bad.

What I was getting upset about was that if the maintainers of these projects helped me then Matrix would overall be better. Obvoiusly it's natural to think that, but that's not how people work. These other projects aren't just naive rewrites of Draupnir. They might have different architecutres, trade-offs, and runtimes. But what really validates these projects is having different priorities.

A lot of the project vision for Draupnir is largely unrealised, and there are a lot of problems to solve, difficult problems. It's only fair that other people have a crack at solving their own problems in absence. Even when they're dedicated to solving as many as us, or even as well as us. One thing for sure is that they will get to their own problems faster than we will get to theirs this way. Because we're dealing with a lot.

My ability to work on Draupnir has largely depended upon me living very very cheaply, having savings, and the NLnet grant. The overall burn-out described here has led to most of the money from the NLnet going unclaimed, and what was claimed stretched thinner over longer than intended. And because of that the material we have to work with to continue to work on Draupnir and make it justifiable, is a lot less. And this specifically has been my fault.

What I really like about the NLnet model is that funding is conditional on delivering value. And I do think that principle is appropriate when applied to organisations and businesses. But I don't think it is entirely appropriate for fulfilling the basic needs of individuals while they are doing work, whether they deliver or not. And that part specifically has lead to a lot of insecurity for me personally.

The NLnet programme that Draupnir is enrolled under will be ending soon. And the project won't be able to continue in the same way without replacing the support with something. We might be able to enroll in another programme, but we should probably think about what should be replacing grant funding overall, and if it is even worth continuing at all?

So there are a few options here, and they're not mutually exclusive:

• Develop sponsorship of myself as someone who delivers value.
• Develop sponsorship of the project as a project that delivers value.
• Consider that we're not that valuable and move on?

I've been really hesitant to try promote sponsorship for myself and the project. In large part that's because I've been insecure of the value the project provides to people⁵. I also worry about whether that adds additional pressure to please the sponsors, and then also if largely successful, if there becomes a point where people donate because I'm visible rather than worthy of that value.

I would like to setup an open collective, but I'm not really sure about who to use as a host for that. And I don't know if that will just prolong letting go. Do these aims really need to be achieved this way, and by me? I don't have to say goodbye to Draupnir⁶, but what if I did say goodbye to these dreams and moved on?

The good news from this is that I haven't tried very hard to develop any sponsorship for either myself or the project. So we can still explore this.

Another insecurity is with moving on itself. I really don't know what job role I would fit right into when I do move on. I have been gaining a lot of experience and developing new skills, but I'm not really sure how to make those a primary relevance to job applications outside of very senior roles that could be a big leap to fulfil. I've not been focussing on frameworks and hot languages. But project management, governance, architecture, software engineering, maintance, community engagement. And probably lots of other things I haven't been thinking about. And I don't think this stuff just leads you into the next job at the level I began the way knowing and being passionate about Rust or Kubernetes might⁷.