Incentivized Well-being of Developers

Published in

KodaDot Frontier

5 min readFeb 17, 2022

We’ve made tons of improvements into KodaDot recently, and we’ve been hitting an average of 220 pull requests on a trailing monthly average which is athletic endurance from a developers perspective. Yet it’s might keep a burden on one’s mental health.

Our KodaDot HQ for upcoming weeks, in Norway, middle of nowhere

Mental downtime for frequent contributors

We believe it’s impossible to keep up the current pace or rampage as we’d love to, and every human being needs to rest a bit. Thus the upcoming days/weeks volume of updates will be less, I guess, and it’s time to relax for us, frequent contributors.

We are still welcoming new contributors, artists and developers, yet we will be, at least I’ll be in lazy mode :)

The best way to refuel your well-being is to take some unwind time before sleep. For best results to get quality sleep, turn down electronics at least 3hrs before bedtime to let your mind calm down and settle for a sleep schedule.

I recommend reading the book; I recently got a kindle, which works for me.

Why it’s important?

I sense that the recent migration to Nuxt we’ve had and post-fixes have been quite heavy on any current contributor, namely @roiLeo @vikiival @kkukelka @prachi00, me including @yangwao.

Lot’s of cosmetic issues, merge conflicts, errors, problems we had might quickly deplete your energy levels under high stress. If I account you probably have all primary jobs or other side hustle running, degree of magnitude must be even more challenging and more vigorous.

With ever coming issues we have and stuff to be fixed, it might feel like a lot’s stuff to be fixed and is like an infinite rabbit hole. Some might enjoy it well, but some challenging puzzles might easily squeeze you out of your best mood while looking cracking on the issue. We all know software develops, and quality is brewed by time and iterations we go through. We are primarily entering a super competitive crypto market, where major market turnarounds happen over the weekend; one needs to be steady to reflect and adapt quickly. But, you are human and not a machine.

Hence I can feel the pain as a founder, and I’ve recently recovered from shallow burnout; I don’t want to repeat you go to the exact bottom. But, despite all the stuff, I’ve come to an image that it would be an ideal time to get off after three months of intense grind.

Why do we need an incentivized retreat?

To incentivize this well-being retreat, it should be paid or give any value for focusing on your well-being.

Thus we are all around the world, not in one place (maybe one day if Sub house would be a thing). I really would like to see you more recreating and relaxing. This doesn’t mean we will not accept your pull requests. I guess we will have just more lazy mode.
Hence, I see those upcoming months might be double or triple on load; I would be more than welcome to prepare for the subsequent grinding stuff series.

To reflect on what have you accomplished is simply breathtaking. Rephrasing it, we’ve doubled monthly pull-requests from the previous month. We were going from approx 100 PRs on average, hitting an all-time high of 250 PR/month.

Hitting 250 pull requests monthly is athletic endurance. Same as athletes, great accomplishment deserves excellent rest. To be prepared for the successive win. We’ve even been noticed by media ranking the KodaDot repository relatively high. Second time in a row, now at the higher position. But you can’t win other medals without rest.

https://twitter.com/polka_daily/status/1494230187248078848 old KodaDot logo, do you remember?

All-hands dev call

Thus to continue, we will try to keep hanging around in Discord. Might we have an all-hands-devs call as we had earlier and chat a bit of stuff we want to reflect on, share the vision, share your best learnings, what we can do better pimp for lowest effort bring most impactful pull-requests and refresh your ideas about NFTs, share your recent recreations and well-being upgrades and so on.

How will we recreate our well-being?

First, I can say that we have planned founders retreat in Norway, going for snowkiting, in the middle of nowhere. With the closest grocery 30km close, it would be a fantastic opportunity for our mental downtime. I’m looking forward to it coming and refreshing my thoughts with a lot of reading and probably not interacting at all with the outside world.

Probably I can not think of any further thoughts on this, but this is most of it.
I value you as well-being, not a machine.
If you can’t enjoy contributing anymore, it slips to mercenary. And I don’t want many mercenaries much around; instead, I prefer missionaries aligned with the KodaDot project vision.
Thus money reward for your contribution should be a side-effect, not the primary objective.

Retroactive airdrop

This should be dedicated to all our early believers, who pushed KodaDot constantly hard hence we did not want to push any sort of token, despite we’ve done an amazing job in the Dotsama ecosystem as an alternative UI for RMRK protocol.

Thank you

We would like to thank namely all our early believers in no particular order

How will we make it real?

I plan to send 1000 USD in KSM to every frequent/recent contributor to KodaDot who’s been significantly pushing KodaDot where it is today; without you, we could not do it. However, until we introduce some of our KodaDot tokens, I want to keep your dignity and not work for free as everyone has bills to pay and something to eat.

Without you, we could not do it.

Cheers, Matej.

Reference

Yangwao previously constructed this text at our Meta_Hours_5

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