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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

#71

Post by matheusmoreira »

matteason wrote: post #63
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 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…

That meta post is very helpful. I thought dang had to email you for the second chance slot.

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

#72

Post by matheusmoreira »

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.

Is there some kind of graph of HN activity which shows the highs and lows? Sounds liie it would be wise to post during the lower traffic periods.

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

#73

Post by matheusmoreira »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #24
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…

Is your motivation validation or learning? If it's learning, each day will be a win...even if your user metrics are trending downwards. If it's validation, your motivation will fluctuate with your traffic patterns.

I don't know what you mean by "validation" though. Do you just mean praise?

What if you just want to make some friends in open source? Truth is I've programming alone for over a decade. Loneliness is a crushing feeling, it feels like nothing matters and that everything is pointless. Recently people started generally interacting with my projects: creating issues, emailing me, I even received my vert first pull request. It feels really amazing, a very welcome change and also extremely motivating. Not sure if I'd call it "validation" though.

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

#74

Post by saghm »

diggan wrote: post #67
rockbruno wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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

It's surprisingly controversial to recognize that the amount of happiness money gets you has diminishing returns, but empirically it's always seemed true to me. If you goal is to maximize happiness, trying to make money from some activities can make you _less_ happy. I guess I'm just not enough of a capitalist to see the value of money that doesn't make me any happier, but after having enough to be comfortable and secure enough about my ability to continue to be in the future, money stops being a motivator for me.

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

#75

Post by matteason »

diggan wrote: post #70
matteason wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks, I'll check out Hetzner. I'd been happy with NearlyFreeSpeech [0] until this project, who also don't charge for bandwidth, but for this project the audio files were orders of magnitude slower downloading from them than from S3 or Cloudflare. Maybe they throttle media downloads or something.

[0] https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

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

#76

Post by bonton89 »

naitgacem wrote: post #31
dewey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That always sounds easier than it is in reality as usually when you came to terms with abandoning your project you don't want to go back to it and spend time on making sure there's no secrets checked in or hardcoded somewhere. There's no embarrassing comments you want to have public etc.

I am now realizing an app I was working on had some "vulgar" function names in tests. they've been changed, but they're still there in version control. I just hope no one looks at the history of tests...

This reminds me of the Dink Smallwood source code release. In addition to the author saying he was somewhat embarrassed with the quality of his code I remember the changelog included something like "Removed over 1500 instances of the word 'shit' from the code comments".

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

#78

Post by JohnFen »

diggan wrote: post #67
rockbruno wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> when I changed my success criteria to be "I learned something new and had fun".

In my view, this is the only success criteria that counts for side projects. If your goal is to make money with a side project, that's not a side project, that's a startup.

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

#79

Post by riku_iki »

dheera wrote: post #37
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.

I have a couple Github repos with a lot of stars and a bunch of pull requests and issues. I used to work actively on them. However in the past 7 months I've been constantly being told at work that what I do isn't enough, without constructive feedback. Pretty much every single 1:1 is "you're not doing enough" and no action items, not enough compute to do what I should be doing, being left out of meetings, and no acces…

My guess is that your company is planning some kind of layoffs, manager received directions to identify XX% of low performers, and he is now building narrative.

I would invest time looking for new job.

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

#80

Post by kazinator »

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…

English sentences with pronouns can show that cases exist in English, rather than that they don't.

Without cases "she gave her number to him" becomes "she gave she number to he".

Yet, that is precisely what we have when we substitute concrete names for the pronouns, except for the possessive: "Alice gave Alice's number to Bob".

Pronoun cases and possessives convey the flavor of what it's like to use a language with full-blown case. You just have to use your imagination: what if all the nouns have cases, and there are six or seven of those cases.

More cases means that, for instance, rather than one "her" word that can be used as "give to her", "do to her", "her number", "go with her" , the language will have different declensions.

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