So it turned out I took a lot of April off.
It’s not entirely clear to me why, but I think part of it is that I am finding this phpBB work less interesting. Also, I’m pretty much set up and have been formally retired since August 2014. I am very comfortably retired and draw both a nice federal pension and social security. Sometimes I want to feel more retired than I am. My phpBB consulting helps pass the days plus it comes and goes. In April there wasn’t much demand, but also I passed on some of the work. I’m getting pickier in my old age.
A lot of the work requests are just that: work. Work I can generally do quickly like a software upgrade I’ll snap up. But a lot of it these days are requests that I’ve come to recognize as big wastes of my time. For example, a client had an extension privately written for him that integrated phpBB with the PayPal API because he monetizes his board’s content through subscriptions. The extension author is no longer available. So basically he wants me to learn the PayPal API and fix it.
In general, I have learned that integrating phpBB with any other third party application only works for a while. The API diverges with time causing issues and I’ll be expected to make it right again. I guess I’m not anxious to go down this rabbit hole since I don’t want to fix subsequent issues that pop up because I’ll be required to relearn the PayPal API again. Sticking with just phpBB makes a lot more sense. There are plenty of others that do similar work like me for the phpBB community. When these jobs are posted on the forums on phpbb.com I generally ignore them and let people come to me.
I have a couple of commercial clients and one of them I’ve been helping for about a dozen years. They want some major changes. Due to some potentially serious health care issues, I may not be alive in five years. So it’s important to transition these clients to a new developer, so that’s what I’ll be doing for this client.
All this is not to suggest you should stop sending me work requests. I’ll let you know if I can or want to handle them. But in general I need to accept more short-term work where I am not on the critical path.
I’m also finding a certain lethargy in that I want to do work that I find intellectually stimulating or is straightforward. I’m less interested digging into the minutia of phpBB code to fix some sort of deeply embedded issue.
Anyhow, I explored a lot of requests with clients in April, but passed on a lot of the work once I saw what they really needed and how complex the work will actually be in both the short term and the long run. I completed these two jobs, however:
- A board was not allowing mysqli device drivers and was using deprecated version PHP 7.4. I was able to change PHP to 8.0 but unable to change mysql to mysqli so suggested he get his web host to fix that.
- Updated a board from phpBB 3.3.7 to 3.3.10. Updated American English language pack to 4.10.0 and Cleantalk to 5.7.6. Changed PHP to 8.0 for all subdomains.
