> hey they aren't shipping their side-projects as quickly or numerously as they would like
What also needs to be shipped quickly and numerously? Oh, I remember, unsolicited commercial email...
It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
11–20 of 99 posts
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#12Abandoned doesn't have to be forever. As I got older I had a longer time horizon and more skill, and found I was picking up and finishing projects I'd laid aside decades earlier. Now when I put something aside I know there's a chance I might pick it up again in ten years. There wasn't much evidence of that when I was twenty-five. It's been one of the best things for me about middle age.
Totally. It’s usually a lack of time, lack of energy, general ‘life getting in the way’, that leads me to drift away from a side-project.
These factors can always be reversed. And (whisper it) a bit of vibe-coding can also help unstick a project that ground to a halt because the next step was dull implementation rather than exciting creation.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#13Experience stays with you forever. Projects have a lifecycle - with death at the end.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#14Experience stays with you forever. Project (side-or not) has a lifecycle with sometimes sudden death.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#15It's funny because he didn't actually abandon it: he finished it, and just found he didn't need it anymore. It's still there, it's still done, and still could be useful to someone (or perhaps himself, in the future, who knows).
I did find it to be a funny twist that, in the act of building the app, he taught himself the thing that the app was supposed to teach him when it was done.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
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Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#17If it's an open source project that has been used by others, please consider giving out maintainer access to others (now or later).
It's sad, when projects are abandoned and a whole bunch of users would be willing to (partially) maintain it, but the key holder implicitly or explicitly decided that nobody else should have access.
Forks are not he same: It's very hard to get enough traction with existing users and the discoverability is terrible.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#18I like the idea of having an “end of life wrap-up" for half-finished side projects. Rather than just stopping and leaving them abandoned, you make something like a report on what you learned, what you built, and why you're stopping. Then it feels less like you've abandoned something outright.
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Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#19I like the idea of having an “end of life wrap-up" for half-finished side projects. Rather than just stopping and leaving them abandoned, you make something like a report on what you learned, what you built, and why you're stopping. Then it feels less like you've abandoned something outright.
I do kind of the opposite, every week every project needs to justify why I should keep doing it and what I learned recently, and if I can't come up with any good reasons or good learnings, I abandon it.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#20I've slowly began to write about abandoned side-projects. It's actually incredible how much you end up re-picking back up.
A gaussian splat converter that I made and abanonded became incredibly useful a few months later when I needed to do a visualisation for a really specific environment