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How to never complete anything

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Re: How to never complete anything

#191

Post by startupdiscuss »

kris-s wrote: post #172
startupdiscuss wrote: post #171

Okay, I am going to share my secret for finishing. I discovered this late, but am glad I did. Are you ready for it? The secret is this: don't start something till you finish the last thing, no matter how poorly. This goes even at a "micro" level, so don't start distributing the load on servers till you finish the last thing (interface), no matter how poorly you finish the last thing. Now you have the secret. Go forth…

Totally agree, my mantra is "The enemy of my main project is all the other projects." Starting is fun and seductive, finishing is a grind, but boy does it feel good when you do. It's how I finished a novel, a massive YouTube project, an iPhone game, etc.

Well put.

I first "discovered" this trick with writing myself.

Re: How to never complete anything

#192

Post by erikpukinskis »

throwaway5356 wrote: post #184
RealityVoid wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find your OS example a little bit misplaced considering a quite complex OS can be completed by one person (obviously more complete than "hello world") but regardless of that, the commercial value of a new OS is quite low but the usefullness of learned (I'd say) is quite high.

Hell, even Terry A. David completed TempleOS, and he's mentally ill. So yeah you sure could complete and release shit, you just don't want to for some reason or other.

That's like saying even Michael Jordan was able to win an NBA title, and he has freakishly large hands!

Terry is a force of nature.

Re: How to never complete anything

#193

Post by wtetzner »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #55
exDM69 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a similar situation to GP. I've done tons and tons of side projects but I rarely have anything to show for it. And why should I? I'm doing it mostly for the fun of coding, and striving to "ship" things takes some of the fun away. I most certainly do not want to start a start up from any of my side projects. Perhaps an established open source project at most. I do "release" my project, ie. push them to GitHub,…

I think you are doing great that you're releasing them into public, but your problem is you are not sharing it enough. I have many friends who release things like you. I'm not saying you are doing this but these guys just release and make no effort to promote them. They are afraid that they will get hurt if they try hard and no one still wants their thing. I understand this is totally valid fear and I have it too, bu…

> I have many friends who release things like you. I'm not saying you are doing this but these guys just release and make no effort to promote them. They are afraid that they will get hurt if they try hard and no one still wants their thing.

The thing is, not everyone builds things to have something at the end. A lot of my side projects exist because I enjoy hacking on them, not because I have some particular end result I'm looking for.

Of course, I have other side projects where I want both, and for those, shipping probably has value.

Re: How to never complete anything

#195

Post by Nadya »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #55
exDM69 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a similar situation to GP. I've done tons and tons of side projects but I rarely have anything to show for it. And why should I? I'm doing it mostly for the fun of coding, and striving to "ship" things takes some of the fun away. I most certainly do not want to start a start up from any of my side projects. Perhaps an established open source project at most. I do "release" my project, ie. push them to GitHub,…

I think you are doing great that you're releasing them into public, but your problem is you are not sharing it enough. I have many friends who release things like you. I'm not saying you are doing this but these guys just release and make no effort to promote them. They are afraid that they will get hurt if they try hard and no one still wants their thing. I understand this is totally valid fear and I have it too, bu…

I write a lot of personal userscripts that I upload publicly to Greasyfork just in case they benefit someone else or someone asks me to share with them. I rarely have plans to improve or maintain any of my work beyond my own benefit. I fix bugs only when they are an issue to my personal work flow. Most of them are quick hackjobs I write in 10 minutes to fix some personal pain point on websites I use.

The amount of users that (a) browse the same websites I do and (b) take issue with the same things I take issue with are next-to-zero.

I also don't care to hear how I could refactor huge parts of my code to be more extendable in the future - because I have no plans to extend it to begin with. I know the code is absolute garbage and I can easily improve it if I took 10 minutes to refactor it. But it works and that's all I needed, so that's all that gets done.

People have different motivations for releasing publicly. I know you were probably speaking more to side projects, especially potentially profitable ones, but I felt I'd throw in my $0.02 to accompany all the others.

Re: How to never complete anything

#196

Post by GFischer »

DizzyDoo wrote: post #49

I finished my side project a couple of years ago, released it, and then found I was able to quit my Python webdev job and go full time making video games. The key difference is that my project was a video game (this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwXl8lDrxn8 ) and that takes a lot of temptation to do what the OP is writing about, rewriting stuff in Haskell for example. The interesting bit when it comes to side…

Looks great! Congratulations on shipping :)

Using cats was a good idea, definitely.

Re: How to never complete anything

#197

Post by axlprose »

> NO MORE TRYING TO REWRITE THINGS IN HASKELL. JUST. GET. SHIT. DONE.

I chuckled at that, because while it makes for a good joke, I've learned from experience that writing stuff in less mainstream languages like Haskell is probably the best way to avoid getting distracted by trendy new frameworks all the time, since they tend to have smaller, more niche focused communities that don't produce new frameworks every week that would even be relevant to you.

Re: How to never complete anything

#198

Post by khedoros1 »

exDM69 wrote: post #66
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are doing great that you're releasing them into public, but your problem is you are not sharing it enough. I have many friends who release things like you. I'm not saying you are doing this but these guys just release and make no effort to promote them. They are afraid that they will get hurt if they try hard and no one still wants their thing. I understand this is totally valid fear and I have it too, bu…

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, I probably do share too little, and I get too discouraged when reddit downvotes my stuff to oblivion. > Next time you build a product try to post it online everywhere like Reddit and Show HN. I'm sure you'll gain more confidence and experience from it. Here's the problem, I never "build a product". My free time is not nearly enough to build a proper product that would a) be fun for me to…

> Basically the best I can do is show a few screenshots or a few hundred lines of interesting code.

I've got some similar projects: An NES emulator that I play with optimizations in, and a bunch of utilities related to the game Ultima Underworld, which are basically waiting to be plugged into an as-yet-unwritten game engine. There's some interesting code (both mine, and disassembled code from the original game binaries), but the shiny, attractive parts are spread thin.

Plus, if I had external pressure to work on these things, I feel like they'd lose some of their interest. Part of why I like them is that they're impractical projects that I can putter around in occasionally, when the muse strikes.

Re: How to never complete anything

#199

Post by fuzzbucket »

throwaway5356 wrote: post #184
RealityVoid wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find your OS example a little bit misplaced considering a quite complex OS can be completed by one person (obviously more complete than "hello world") but regardless of that, the commercial value of a new OS is quite low but the usefullness of learned (I'd say) is quite high.

Hell, even Terry A. David completed TempleOS, and he's mentally ill. So yeah you sure could complete and release shit, you just don't want to for some reason or other.

Yeah, that's a pretty fucking ableist thing to say, so maybe you could just not say it.

Re: How to never complete anything

#200

Post by lukewrites »

rickdg wrote: post #178
lukewrites wrote: post #176

Two things have made a huge different in my ability to finish/ship: 1. External Deadlines. I'm a career teacher, mostly self-taught Python/Django developer, and am applying for dev jobs. The school year's over in June, and I want to be able to step into a new jr position in July/August. I'm planning to resign my position this spring, and cannot be out of work. My benefits and salary will stop in September. I'm f'ed i…

So your recommendation is to sacrifice sleep time?

I edited that bit out of my post above. I guess it's about prioritization.

I had to make tradeoffs to maintain the schedule and not be worn out at work. I decided to start going to bed a bit earlier so I could get up earlier. To facilitate this, I changed my workout schedule (I'm doing HIIT for cardio rather than time-based workouts) and cut some other activities that didn't seem as important as my other goals. Worth it.

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