Maintainer bandwidth throughout 2025

[tjex]

Hello all.

Just some context ahead of time about the state of affairs with maintainer attention.

2024 marked the first year in the change of guard from Michael being the sole maintainer of the project. He had to pass the project, which saw a few of us take over. Since then the attention given by others has gradually dropped off (not a criticism), meaning I'm effectively covering all issues and PRs (also over at zk-nvim).

I've had solid spare time on my hands through 2024 but as of 2025 I will have less. I'm starting a side job of 20 hours a week, and have taken on a freelance web development role. As well as this I'm writing my masters thesis.

I expect to have the masters thesis done by October 2025 and it's unclear how much time the freelance job will require.

So activity from my side may be a bit slow / sporadic here through 2025.
But the love is still there! I use zk every day (I'm wrting my thesis in zk 💪).

As such, bug fixes will take a higher priority than features throughout this time.

[jurica]

Thanks for letting us know and also thanks for the great work last year, you managed it all really well!

[tjex]

Thanks :) I appreciate that.

[c-c-k]

Hello, I would like to help with ZK's development ... I think (I'm not really good with focusing/making up my mind/following through on my decisions 😓).

I've been trying to start using a zetel/PKB for the last 2 Years, not being able to decide which of the many excellent vim&nvim note management plugins available to use I've tried to do something of my own, but not having a clear view of what I actually wanted it bogged down to a standstill with little more than create note and follow link.

Also I've been wanting to contribute to open source ever since I started using Linux.

A few months ago I've decided (as much as I can decide on anything) that I'm going to use and contribute to ZK, but still not managing to get a clear view of the note-taking workflow that I wanted I didn't actually start using it so far.

For the last two months I've learned the basics of Go and Lua.

Before I saw this announcement I've been thinking of first trying again to figure out my note-taking routine and then start thinking if and how I can contribute to ZK.
But now I think that maybe I should do the opposite, try to become an active part of ZK's development and in the process of doing so hopefully get a clearer view of my own own note-taking.

Being honest my motives are not entirely "pure", while I genuinely do want to become an active FOSS contributor I'm also hoping that those contributions could down the road help me to find a high-tech job.
For the moment though I'm leeching of my parents so I think I should have a fair amount of free time.

Hence, following all that annoying ranting I would like to ask you to suggest a starting point, I've been casually looking through issues, discussion and source code but not currently using ZK myself I can't get a grasp on where I should start from.

Sorry for wasting your time 🙏😰

[tjex]

Hello. Don't be too hard on yourself. We all started at some point. I myself am a late comer to programming, so have faced (and still face) the goblins of imposter syndrome.

In terms of note taking programs / workflows, the best way is to just spend some time using as many as it takes till you figure out what works best for you.

As for contributing / helping out, go for it! You don't have to be an 'official maintainer' to contribute. Usually in open source people come on board as maintainers after already contributing for some time as a community member. Your user name etc is logged against commits / project history all the same, so there's no loss of kudos or 'invisible' work being done.

Contribution to documentation and the documentation site is also a great help.

[c-c-k]

Thanks 😃
I'll look around a bit more and try to find an issue that I think I can handle.