Life Update: On maintainer leave for midterms exam

Editor's note (2026-03-16): This was intended to be posted during the hell week (aka last week), but you know what happened when you're busy doing schoolwork during the lead up to the exams.

Hello there, this is Andrei Jiroh writing on the Atmosphere via Leaflet. Hope you are doing well, probably somewhere safe amidst the wars in Ukraine, Palestine and Iran, among others.

As the BDFL0 and lead open-source developer/maintainer at Recap Time Squad ( @recaptime.dev , currently a one-person operation for those asking about bus factors ), I am going to be in maintainer break effective immediately, specifically to focus on the midterms exam in March 17 through 21 as well as taking a mental health break afterwards0. During this period, development work0 is temporarily paused but I'll be still doing infrastructure and administrative operations0 behind the scenes, albeit in limited availability unless something related to academic or personal. I'll be doing occasional updates over at Recap Time Squad HQ Zulip and Hack Club Slack's #365-days channel , alongside my blog in the atmosphere (courtesy of @leaflet.pub ) while doing infra-related chores for my @ghost.org instance.

Regarding the blog, I have some queued up and even writing a few new stuff behind the scenes, so please do share them whether you catch them on your feed and I hope that they'll be as useful as my posts normally are. Crossposting to Substack and friends will follow up soon once I sort things up, especially since I haven't been get my Ghost instance properly migrated to my homelab from Nest (I have the database and app data files on hand, just busy right now to do the infra work) and gone through the backlog of drafts left unpublished.

I'm under a fair bit of stress (and even crashed out to sleep a few times) leading to this maintainer leave and I'm hoping that I will be back with my usual writing here and as much as I hope it is. Focusing on writing and open-source dev while studying in college is hard when you are always getting hit by the burnout bus in a society where mental health and neurodivergence is still stigmatized (but there were also some progress to some extent) and existing while being neurodivergent and/or disabled can be as traumatizing as the taxpayers' money being milked by politicians for their personal interests.

Don't worry about me. I want you to be happy for me. This is just the academics need to be prioritized during the exam week while hauling over a lot behind the scenes (which can't be easily discussed in the open for privacy and safety reasons although I already mentioned autistic burnout/trauma on most cases, so that's given).

Thanks for reading and stay safe out there.

Andrei Jiroh

If you have read to the end, I basically adapted the text from @xeiaso.net 's medical leave life update post (more details here and here ), tweaked for my case of midterms exam and mental health rest period under a maintainer leave. If you want to chip in financially to support my open-source work, consider sponsoring me via GitHub Sponsors or Recap Time Squad via HCB (alternative ways are documented here ).