Hello friends! This was my final day as a member of the Flutter organization, so I’ve decided to take a couple of minutes to share and reflect on the experience.
Back when Flock was announced, I took it as a personal attack. One of their main critiques was that Flutter team members weren’t doing enough work to get valuable contributions to the finish line; it felt like all the effort I had been making was being ignored. Rather than try to make a “Flutter+” and deal with never-ending merge conflicts, I felt the best way to contribute was to hold Flutter to a high open-source standard and do the best I could within the existing system. Unfortunately that didn’t work out super well.
People with roommates probably understand that when you spend a lot of time with the same people, sometimes you start to wear down on each other. I’ve noticed I have a tendency to be very enthusiastic, argumentative, and pretentious (Exhibit A: writing this post about myself). If I had been in the position of the Flutter team leaders today, I would have done the exact same thing—unfortunately there were a few ways where I failed to live up to their expectations and they failed to meet mine.
To misquote one of my favorite songs:
Something has changed within me; something is not the same.
I’m through with playing by the rules of someone else’s game.
Take a message back from me:
If I’m flying solo, at least I’m flying free.
I am incredibly grateful to have had this chance to gain a deeper knowledge of this amazing framework and contribute to its value in multiple ways. For at least the next year, I probably won’t be interacting much with github.com/flutter, but I look forward to staying involved in other aspects, including employment, personal projects, and contributions to the countless other Dart projects outside of the Flutter organization.
I’m always grateful for everyone who has contributed at least one commit / useful suggestion to the Flutter repository so thank you for your contributions.
Focusing on your post, I’m not really sure what I’ve just read and I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about what you’ve shared.
You’ve shared a private email but there’s context within it which is difficult to understand because we don’t have access to the hyperlinks to understand what the problem was and I’m not sure if it’s something relevant to be shared here because I don’t think anyone here can help with your situation (if that’s what you want).
Regardless of what has happened, it shouldn’t put you off submitting more helpful contributions towards Flutter because Flutter is bigger than just Google, Flutter is it’s own entire community of passionate developers building great apps.
Technically I still have the ability to submit pull requests, but given that PR triage is handled by Google employees, at this point I think I’d rather not rock the boat any more than I already have.
As far as contradicting the public documentation, I’m hesitant to share more details since it then becomes very easy to deduce who was involved. But as far as Code of Conduct violations, feel free to look at flutter/flutter #159570 (comment).
The main reason for this post was that I understand this situation to be a nuanced combination of my own flaws and those of others on the Flutter team. I’m happy that I had the chance to share this and really enjoyed reading through these comments. Fortunately, I don’t feel like I need any additional help
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. Stay safe and keep rock’n