Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?

For me the best way to stay focused on any given project is to find clients for it. Even if it's just a handful. If you know that there are people out there willing to pay for it, even if it's ramen money, you have all the motivation you will ever need.

I think it's totally OK, normal and beneficial to want to experiment with different applications.

The main issue is after a few years you may feel like you have nothing to show for it and the best solution to that feeling that I've found is to document what you've learnt in a blog post. Over time you'll end up with a large personal knowledge base on which you can draw on when you want to and actally can finish a complex project. You'll also attract the right kind of people that can help you by putting your thoughts down in writing.

The idea is you want to slowly build yourself to be the kind of person that can finish a complex project in a weekend and the best way to do that is to constantly be in the high payoff space you get when you're learning something totally new.

I don't have advice but am looking for some along a similar vain. I've made lots of projects in the past but now not so much and my fiction is that I'm super jaded by which I mean since I have lots of experience I know all the things I want to do are relatively huge projects and it's unrealistic to even start and further even if I was to finish it's unlikely to be successful. Not that every project has to be successful but I can't see investing 1-3 years into it if I don't actually believe it it's likely to do well.

For a small project 1 - 5 days I there's no issue. Though often when I'm finished I look back and think, "If I had spent that time working on something that had more of a future then I'd also have more of a future". Success buys freedom so when I don't pursue something with a future I have only myself to blame for having to go back and "work for the man".

So, how do I get over that jadedness and as Shia Labeouf would say "Just Do It!"

So, I'll take a different tack: Are you interested in finishing projects or are you interested in learning new things? Because those goals aren't exactly 100% aligned.

It sounds like your motivation is more about learning new things. If that's the case, lots of small, half-baked projects can definitely be educational.

You're also mentioning projects that take significant ramp-up time before they might start to get a life of their own.

So, that being said, I have a couple of book recommendations:

If what you want to do is learn software development in a growing way, I highly recommend Mastering Software Technique: https://software-technique.com/. It's all about using bursts of time to learn new things as fast as you can. For your situation, it sounds close to what you've been practicing, with just a tiny bit more process.

If what you want to do is actually build something on the side for people other than yourself (which is _not_ a requirement for learning useful things), then I recommend https://jessicaabel.com/growing-gills/.

For me, I've embraced the non-essential nature of my side projects. I've had quite a few over the years, some large, some small. Being able to put one on the back-burner and come back it later has been very handy. Most of my sideprojects these days are ones I can get to "done" in a day or two, and I have a couple longer-running ones that I pick at off and on. My motivation for a particular project varies, some are meant to scratch a _very_ specific itch:

- https://github.com/yumaikas/dirx was basically done in a late night and a morning - https://idea.junglecoder.com/view/idea/274 I've done 3 times, first in bash, then in Go (in a rather late night, to scratch an itch), and then again in Nim (to learn Nim, and compare it against Go).

Some projects I have are a lot longer running. Both PISC " rel="nofollow">https://pisc.junglecoder.com> (now on indefinite hiatus) and Tabula Scripta " rel="nofollow">https://github.com/yumaikas/tabulaScripta> have run a lot longer than my typical project. One quality of both is that they have work at quite a few different levels of detail. Am I tired of parsing work? I can work on prototyping a game in PISC. Do I want to make the performance dramatically better for my artificial Fibonacci benchmark? Great time to break out the Go profiler. Do I want to make it way easier to concatenate strings in a stack-based language? Maybe today I figure out how to write an evalbot. (These are _all_ things I did in PISC at different times).

Tabula Scripta is still early days, I haven't had the time to use it for that sort of experimentation, but it will have a similarly broad set of applications and problems to solve.

And, like other people have said, it definitely helps to do you side projects in a different IDE/Language than your work. And if learning is a big motivator, keeping your projects smaller, or making them the sort of things that's easier to break into smaller parts can be very helpful.

find a customer for your side project. even if it is one customer, even if she is a friend of yours.

getting a feedback from your early customer will be more than enough to keep you motivated