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It's OK to abandon your side-project

robbowen.digital

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Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project

#61

Post by davnicwil »

> The tech stack would be simple too. At the time of planning, Svelte 3.0 was the new shiny so I decided to use it for my UI. I knew that I wanted to host everything on Netlify, so for the backend I'd write a couple serverless functions to present the questions and check the answers. The main list of nouns could be served from a static JSON file and, as I'd be the only user, I could safely persist previous quiz results and a high-score to local storage.

To be blunt this is exactly the kind of stack that you'll regret hard if you ever come back to pick up an abandoned project.

They always seem simple at the time when the whole system is loaded into your brain, but will be utterly incomprehensible on cold start in a year, especially when the cool stuff you stitched together has itself respectively moved on several major versions.

I've learned this the hard way from trying to revisit several abandoned projects over the years. Seriously, just use your language's equivalent of rails, and follow all the conventions. That way you can go right to the docs in future and pick up where you left off.

Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project

#62

Post by AlexAndScripts »

input_sh wrote: post #60
brabel wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And can get completely different response when posted at just the right/wrong time. I've had posts I made that got no attention, just for someone else to post the same thing a few days/weeks later and it reached near the top, with hundreds of comments.

My go-to "trick" is to check /new beforehand. If the last post on the first page is posted under an hour ago, odds are whatever you post is gonna be burried very quickly afterwards. If there's less things posted to /new at that particular time, it seems a bit more likely someone gets a chance to interact with it before it disappears from that first page of /new.

Interesting. I was wondering why my recent show HN posts were significantly less successful than a (imo not as good) post on a similar topic the day before.

Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project

#63

Post by matteason »

brabel wrote: post #44
gsky wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker news traffic lasts just 2 days.

And can get completely different response when posted at just the right/wrong time. I've had posts I made that got no attention, just for someone else to post the same thing a few days/weeks later and it reached near the top, with hundreds of comments.

My modestly successful Show HN for my last project [0] was the third time I'd submitted it - the first two got no traction at all. It does feel like luck of the draw sometimes, and it can be very demotivating.

At least HN tolerates reposts if you don't get any attention the first time round [1]; if your launch bombs on ProductHunt, you don't get a second chance (ask me how I know!)

On gsky's about HN traffic lasting two days - that was definitely my experience, though if it's interesting enough it'll likely get picked up by other sites too. Blogs, podcasts etc are always picking stuff up from Reddit and HN.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38856999

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772114

Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project

#64

Post by matteason »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #22
itqwertz wrote: post #3

As long as you complete it, just keep it out there. You never know when your half-baked idea might result in a lead for something new. It’s fun to go back to old projects and finish them with new skills you’ve acquired over the years.

What if it becomes so popular it's costing hundreds of dollars to host. Asking for a friend...

Is the cost mostly bandwidth? Cloudflare free tier is a godsend for static sites. I have a project which is audio-heavy and has used 2TB of bandwith since the start of January. It would have been about $180 of egress costs from S3, but routing it through the Cloudflare free tier CDN with an agressive caching policy has basically eliminated those costs.

Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project

#65

Post by d1sxeyes »

kazinator wrote: post #6

If you're explaining case to English speakers, don't use sentence with "he" and "her" as examples of how English does not have case, and does not allow easy rearrangement. Because those pronouns are the one place in English where vestiges of case can be found, making it confusing.

It's pretty hard to come up with examples of how something does not exist. I don't know if the article has been revised since it was posted, but now it uses proper nouns instead of pronouns.

Another minor nit, verbs conjugate, nouns decline. Otherwise I quite enjoyed the article, although the idea that a 50 character or so regex will cover all your edge cases seems to be optimistic (never studied Latvian, but have some experience in learning various languages with case systems with varying degrees of success).

Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project

#67

Post by diggan »

rockbruno wrote: post #46
shubhamjain wrote: post #23

It's a fair point, but I often see all the ideas I abandoned and realize how some of them could have become profitable had I persisted and not lost motivation. Even a tiny setback (say, no response on Hacker News) was enough for me to stop working on the idea, and start working on something new. Of course, you learn a lot along the way, but to have a successful side-hustle you need to learn to sustain and channel the…

From your description it sounds like you're placing "making money" / "success" as your main motivation for these projects, which would explain why you're losing it so easily. Extrinsic motivations are very easy to lose, it sounds like you need to prioritise more intrinsic things such as having fun or learning something interesting. Check out intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation

This!

My side-projects went from "constant failures" to "always a success" when I changed my success criteria to be "I learned something new and had fun". Granted, some see it as cheating, but if it improves my happiness, I'm fine with cheating a bit as long as it doesn't hurt others.

Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project

#68

Post by vitus »

d1sxeyes wrote: post #65
kazinator wrote: post #6

If you're explaining case to English speakers, don't use sentence with "he" and "her" as examples of how English does not have case, and does not allow easy rearrangement. Because those pronouns are the one place in English where vestiges of case can be found, making it confusing.

It's pretty hard to come up with examples of how something does not exist. I don't know if the article has been revised since it was posted, but now it uses proper nouns instead of pronouns. Another minor nit, verbs conjugate, nouns decline. Otherwise I quite enjoyed the article, although the idea that a 50 character or so regex will cover all your edge cases seems to be optimistic (never studied Latvian, but have so…

I think using pronouns with cases like I / me / my as a contrast to other nouns like "dog" would convey the difference.

> the idea that a 50 character or so regex will cover all your edge cases seems to be optimistic

At the very least. I'm thinking of Latin, where you can and will have ambiguity which declension a noun belongs to and what gender it is (e.g. frūctus (4th, m) vs pecus (3rd, f) vs pectus (3rd, n) vs actus (2nd, m)), and you just have to memorize which is which, since that entirely changes its endings as well as that of the corresponding adjective. Third declension is also wacky in that the stem isn't always present, e.g. pectus -> pectoris (where the stem here is pector-).

Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project

#69

Post by diggan »

cnity wrote: post #52
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like returning to an early area in an RPG and discovering side quests and treasure chests you couldn’t reach before.

Total tangent, but I originally found Dark Souls too confusing and challenging and abandoned it. When I came back later for another try something clicked and it quickly became my favourite single player game of all time. It's funny how that works.

Had a similar experience with The Witcher 3. Tried to play it maybe 3-4 times, always abandoning it after one or two hours.

Not until I got a Steam Deck and could play in the sofa/more comfortably and when away from home, that I actually got into the game, which is similarly one of my favorite games now :)

Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project

#70

Post by diggan »

matteason wrote: post #64
tppiotrowski wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it becomes so popular it's costing hundreds of dollars to host. Asking for a friend...

Is the cost mostly bandwidth? Cloudflare free tier is a godsend for static sites. I have a project which is audio-heavy and has used 2TB of bandwith since the start of January. It would have been about $180 of egress costs from S3, but routing it through the Cloudflare free tier CDN with an agressive caching policy has basically eliminated those costs.

Modern bandwidth charges is the most heinous modern scam against developers. Yes, great that Cloudflare has a free tier, but the cost of anything AWS shouldn't be the baseline, it's one of the more expensive options out there, especially their "premium" bandwidth.

I've had a dedicated server from Hetzner for 28 EUR/month, with no bandwidth costs and no metering. I currently host 20+ static websites + a bunch of other services from this host now, with no issues and performance is fantastic. So ends up being less then 1EUR/month per "thing" run on that server, and I don't contribute to making the web more "Cloudflare-only".

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