An update on the state of the project

[rickyah]

Hi everyone.

First of all I want to apologize for the lack of updates.
Long story sort: due to a combination of too much work, dealing with the pandemic, and personally shifting priorities in my life to focus on my family, I lacked the time and mental energy to continue the development on this project.

I'm changing jobs and letting myself some time to rest until next year, which gave me the opportunity to think about this project and its future a lot.

I started this project more than a decade ago with two goals:

1. learn
2. give back to the community

When the project started I was living a very different life: I was working in building desktop applications and I used .net every day. This library started to scratch an itch I had at my work, so I would sometimes add small enhancements or bug fixes as part of my workday.
Many things has changed since them. I moved to a different city, I swiched fields multiple times (web/backend/mobile games) and my responsabilities at work have increassed. The work I do now is so different that I can't justify spending work time into this project.
In addition, having a family limits the amount of free time you get and at the same time gives you other things to priorize that tiem (kids)

Of course I could had log to at least explain the situation long time ago, so this is not an excuse, but just the explanation I failed to give you all for so much time.
Again, I'm sorry for my selfishnes and for keeping you all in the dark.

However, it is indeed awesome to see you people engaged on this project and taking the time to update it to work in the newest .net versions, issuing PRs, creating forks to keep the development, or even creating new NuGet packages with the newests bug fixes and enhancements.
This really put a smile on my face; I had forgotten about my second goal: giving back, and you remind me of it.

That being said, is obvious that we need avoid the one point of failure, so to me the obvious solution is to add more maintainer(s)
I'm totally new to this so any advice or feedback will be appreciated

If you are interested on being a maintainer, please reply here or drop me a line at rickyah@gmail.com.

In the meantime, I will try to dedicate some time to at least reply to the issues and check the PRs.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

[briansilvers]

I'm interested in being a maintainer. I find this library useful.

[MikeAinOz]

I'm using it. I could be a tester!

[sandrock]

Hello. I will start maintaining of fork of the project here and nuget here.