The end of an era

The title of this post is somewhat vague, and it's there for dramatic effect; it's mainly about my userstyles, so stick until the end and let me explain.

As mentioned in my previous post, I'm dedicating more time to doing other things instead of just writing userstyles. Don't get me wrong — I do love writing userstyles (and have been doing it for over 3 years now) — but there are other things that are far more interesting, and will be quite rewarding in the long-run.

# What does this mean?

There will be changes in the amount of time I spend on userstyles after the rewrite of my userstyle for GitLab, and possibly the userstyle for Discord.

Primarily, I won't be thoroughly testing for bugs and/or implementing new features from scratch, like I did in userstyles for WhatsApp and Discord. That means I'll have to rely on users to contribute issues and/or code.

# Contributing

This largely means that I'd like that you — the user — contribute by reporting the issues that you have or the bugs that you find. Even though it doesn't seem like a huge deal, it helps tremendously to debug and further improve things, so that we all can enjoy better dark themes for sites that we use.

If you'd like to contribute code, I highly encourage you to have a look at the source code and submit a pull request. Don't hesitate to contact me if you need help to figure something out, I'll be there to help you the best I can.

During recent code rewrites, I've spent a fair amount of time documenting the code so that it's easier to come back to down the road or get started with by someone new to the code-base. It's by no means perfect, but it should serve as a good starting point.

# A few words on goals

One of the things I mentioned in my previous post was accomplishing goals on my bucket list; one of which was to occassionally get a cup of coffee at a coffee shop near my university.

It was one of the things I didn't have to worry about because it was entirely funded thanks to the generous people that supported my work. This was great for working on the reward system that I briefly touched on in the Keeping myself busy post a few months ago.

At first I really wanted to get a GitLab hoodie, but it ran out of stock at some point and was unavailable for months, so I had to switch my goal to something else. Hopefully one day they'll bring it back because it's the most amazing item in their shop.

This way I want to give a public thank you to everyone that supported my work thus far! This goes to all the supporters on ko-fi and LiberaPay, as well as to all the people that use my userstyles, starred the repositories, contributed issues/code, and last but not least, everyone that contacted me via e-mail. It always felt great knowing that someone found my work valuable.

# Closing words

All of my userstyles are a labor of love and hard work. I poured a lot of time into this hobby while figuring out how to collaborate and manage a small open-source project. It isn't an easy decision to put less time into something you're good at and go spend more time with something you're new and inexperienced with, but in the long-run it'll pay off.

After all, the comfort zone can be quite dangerous. I've been trying to break free from it for a good while now, but that's a story for another time.