Motivation behind Rocketry

[Miksus]

Hi!

Trust is the most fundamental block of open-source so I thought I could elaborate on why I created Rocketry and what my personal intentions for it are, for those who wonder.

In short, my motivations are the following:

• Personal needs
• Passion
• Career growth

Personal needs

The initial need for the library was just personal. I needed a scheduler for my web scrapers (mostly news feed) and I thought Cron was too simple for the job and Airflow was too complicated. As Rocketry (then Red Engine) turned out to be quite a sophisticated library I thought to open its source and make it as an official library. At first, it did not get much popularity but it didn't matter that much: it was useful for me.

When Rocketry gained popularity also my intentions for the library changed. I don't have much time to develop my scrapers and now most of my hobby programming goes to Rocketry. Rocketry is my new passion project.

Passion

I think Rocketry is quite an amazing library and I see a lot of potential for it. It is becoming more than just a scheduler framework and I have a vision that it could be the engine to power autonomous software whether it means IOT apps, DevOps systems, data orchestration or simulations. It feels awesome to be the captain of such a library.

Actually, the name of the library (Rocketry) has a special meaning for me: my childhood dream was to be an astronautical engineer and I was passionate about rocket science (still find it really fascinating).

I also genuinely like to help people. Unfortunately, I have a full-time job, my own non-programming hobbies and other time sinks which means I don't have time to answer everyone and sometimes I just forget. But I genuinely like the support I have gotten. As a relatively humble and down-to-earth person, the feedback felt quite amazing and helped me push forward.

Career Growth

I cannot lie that money would not be a motivation. Of course it is. However, I'll never close-source Rocketry and I will never sell it off in any way, it's more important than that and I'm well off financially. I hope that Rocketry helps me to get interesting career opportunities and sometimes I dream of building applications with it that I could monetarize. Rocketry's features are inspired by the needs I have in my closed-sourced work but those are not the driving factor for the development. Rocketry is meant to be generic and agile and I'm happy to include features I don't personally need but are very useful for others.

I also hope to get enough sponsors at some point so that I could take regularly unpaid time off just to focus on Rocketry.

Thanks for reading,
Miksu