Where I've Been
/ 4 min read
I’m writing this from the airport, about to board a flight to Boston for Laracon 2026.
I’m super anxious.
The last time most of you heard from me, I was looking for my next adventure. That was early March. Then I just… vanished.
I started at Luma on March 16th, and I’ve been having an absolute blast building AI integrations and systems with Laravel and Prism, helping the team with agentic coding workflows, shipping features that actually matter for education. The work has been incredible.
But I also completely disappeared from the face of the earth. No social media. No Prism updates. No community engagement. Radio silence for four months.
I feel INCREDIBLY guilty about that. Ashamed, honestly. I feel like I let so many people down.
So here’s what happened, and why I’m trying to come back now.
What I’ve been dealing with
I’ve struggled with my mental health for most of my life, but it’s been pretty extreme since May 2025. Depression, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar disorder… all of it compounding, making everything feel impossible when I’m already underwater. It’s been the hardest, scariest, most stressful period of my life. I’ve never experienced anything like it.
At the start of this year, I was still really struggling. Only over the last month or so have things started to stabilize. New meds, therapy, doing the hard work of actually facing the stuff I’ve been running from. There’s still a lot of room to go, but I’m feeling better than I have since early 2025.
In mid-February, Clarity, my wife, destroyed her ankle. Compound fracture, bone sticking out of her leg, emergency surgery, screws and a plate, six to eight weeks non-weight-bearing. I had to take a massive step back from everything and tend to my family.
This summer, my son really needed me present. And I needed to be there.
People often asked how I was able to find so much time to work on Prism and Iris… well, I took that time from everywhere else in my life. I found myself massively behind on responsibilities, house projects, attention to my marriage, basic life maintenance. I had to step away to attend to all that stuff and play massive catch-up on my life.
I still feel behind on a bunch of it.
And in late August, Clarity is having a double mastectomy. So we’re not completely out of the woods on the health stuff.
Why I couldn’t come back
Here’s the thing, though.
Every time I thought about coming back to Prism, I’d open GitHub and see the mountain: issues piling up, comments asking if the project was abandoned, pull requests waiting, feature work stalled. With my ADHD and everything else I was dealing with, it felt crushing. Overwhelming to the point of paralysis. I couldn’t stomach diving back into it.
And the guilt and shame of disappearing, of leaving people high and dry like that… that became its own barrier. The longer I stayed away, the harder it got to come back. I’ve been working on this in therapy.
I let people down. I let myself down.
I’m sorry.
Coming back, sustainably
So why now?
Last week, Claude and I built a tool to help me rapidly catch up. I’m calling it Prism Triage: it’s a local tool for digging out of a stale open-source backlog. It syncs open issues and PRs (plus a two-year closed-issue corpus) into SQLite, computes the mechanical facts a maintainer would otherwise assemble across a dozen browser tabs (CI status, file overlap, contributor history, blast radius), and runs four Prism passes over the whole corpus to cluster themes, classify who can actually resolve each item, and surface “seams” - single decisions that would dispose of many items at once.
It worked. I can actually see a path forward now.
I’m using Laracon 2026 and the massive wave of inspiration and energy that comes with it to come back to Prism and Iris. But this time, sustainably. I’ve time-blocked dedicated slots in my calendar for open-source work. I’ve got a ton of fresh ideas, and I’m actually getting super excited to work on it again.
My wife is super supportive and encouraging me to get back to it.
I’m still nervous about facing the community. I’m scared I’ve burned bridges, that people won’t trust me anymore, that the momentum is gone. But I’m showing up anyway.
What’s next
I’m at Laracon this week. I’m going to soak up the inspiration, reconnect with people, remember why I love this work in the first place.
Then I’m coming back to Prism. For real this time, with boundaries and sustainability baked in from the start.
I can’t promise I’ll never stumble again. Life is messy, health is unpredictable, and I’m still learning how to balance all of this.
But I can promise I’m trying.
Thanks for sticking around, and for your patience while I figured my life out.
TJ