I don't feel the "moral weight" the author mentions.
For one, there are many, many directions you could take at any given moment, but you have to choose only one. You have no choice but to triage. That's not a moral failing, just the nature of agency and existence.
I do have some perfectionistic tendencies, which might be behind some of this. But a long time ago I graduated to a deeper perfectionism...
The problem with simple perfectionism is that you can only achieve a level of perfection in a simple and superficial way, often to the neglect of more interesting goals... after you "perfect" something, you look deeper and inevitably see more problems. You can pursue those, but you then just look deeper again and repeat. At some point you'll realize you're spending a lot of time on something that is only meaningful to an arbitrary standard that exists only in your own head (that you only recently invented).
So I moved on to "perfecting" the balance across the relevant competing concerns and constraints. Since there's rarely a perfect balance, no closed-form answer, and since your attention is certainly one of the factors to balance, real perfection requires that you can find something "good enough" given the circumstance to move on to something else.
Put another way, if you can't find satisfaction of your perfectionist impulse in finding something good enough, you could be doing "perfection" better, and should probably work on that.
I don't know if this is what the author meant, but the "moral weight" appears for me when someone starts relying on my stuff.
This is why so many open-source maintainers burn out: they create something that people find useful and suddenly, almost inadvertently, incur the obligation to keep users happy. That is both the best part and worse part of creating software.
> the "moral weight" appears for me when someone starts relying on my stuff
Yeah. These feelings of guilt are terrible. I once threw something out there and forgot about it. Woke up one day and realized users had found it somehow, they even built new stuff on top of it. Someone asked for help on how to use the thing and I didn't even notice because I had notifications turned off.
In these situations I repeat the license terms to myself like a mantra. The software is provided "as-is", in the hope it will be useful, but without any warranty.
For one, there are many, many directions you could take at any given moment, but you have to choose only one. You have no choice but to triage. That's not a moral failing, just the nature of agency and existence.
I do have some perfectionistic tendencies, which might be behind some of this. But a long time ago I graduated to a deeper perfectionism...
The problem with simple perfectionism is that you can only achieve a level of perfection in a simple and superficial way, often to the neglect of more interesting goals... after you "perfect" something, you look deeper and inevitably see more problems. You can pursue those, but you then just look deeper again and repeat. At some point you'll realize you're spending a lot of time on something that is only meaningful to an arbitrary standard that exists only in your own head (that you only recently invented).
So I moved on to "perfecting" the balance across the relevant competing concerns and constraints. Since there's rarely a perfect balance, no closed-form answer, and since your attention is certainly one of the factors to balance, real perfection requires that you can find something "good enough" given the circumstance to move on to something else.
Put another way, if you can't find satisfaction of your perfectionist impulse in finding something good enough, you could be doing "perfection" better, and should probably work on that.