However... maybe, just maybe... if we can get a small team, let's say 3 people, who are willing to support each other and learn on their own, we could tackle that newspaper system I talked about as a standalone project. It would give everyone enough experience with PHP and Doctrine to make the jump into the BM code a lot easier.
For the love of Cthulhu, Tom, if we had 3 people like that, I could use the
crap out of them just fixing the damn bugs that have been accreting lately.
Seriously, I'm not going to get burned out helping a small team learn the ropes and easing them into bugfixing. Heck, even less so than a single person, most likely, because I can tell them all the same thing at once and get 3 times the return out of it.
What is more likely to burn me out is continuing to work alone on this forever, trying desperately to both move the game forward
and tackle the rising tide of bugs by myself.
Bugfixing is
so useful for getting new devs—even those new to PHP and Doctrine—up to speed. I can point them at general areas of code, describe the gist of how things are supposed to work, and review diffs without much trouble. True, for the first few bugs, I'd probably be spending as much effort guiding the newbies as I would fixing them myself. But that effort quickly starts to pay itself back as they are able to fix more bugs on their own.
The big key features, though, are "self-motivated" and "good at learning on the fly." And those are things that, so far as I can tell, there's absolutely no way to test for except to try it out and see.