Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)

robbowen.digital

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 99 posts

Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)

#21

Post by raphinou »

I have such a project I just can't shut down: https://myowndb.com/ I started it 20 years ago, with ruby on rails. I neglected it but then decided to rewrite it in F# and publish it as open source (https://gitlab.com/myowndb/myowndb). There are very few users, some from many years ago, all non paying. None gave any feedback I asked during the rewrite. I should have shut it down years ago, but I just can't take the step. I'm focused on another project now, but who knows, maybe I'll get back to it....

Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)

#22

Post by leni536 »

eXpl0it3r wrote: post #17

If 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…

I feel uneasy about this after the xz story.

Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)

#23

Post by keiferski »

embedding-shape wrote: post #19
keiferski wrote: post #9

I 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.

That's a good idea too, but I think the wrap-up postmortem helps me clear my mind a bit. Personally I feel like having a formal declaration of "it's finished, for now at least" takes a weight off my mind.

Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)

#24

Post by dewey »

I always had a hard time with that and kept things running for too long as putting additional work into shutting something down when you already lost interest is a hard sell.

Now I usually just add a static landing page, some screenshots how it looked like and turn of the backend (Example: https://getbirdfeeder.com) which makes me feel better about it.

Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)

#26

Post by phaser »

This advice is sound only if you think of success as defined by SV-investor-echo-chamber standards.

Too many "tales of side-projects that grew into successful businesses" can narrow your understanding of what it actually means. I agree that it's OK to abandon a side project, but it is a much deeper reflection.

Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)

#28

Post by ghgr »

lpln3452 wrote: post #27

Most of my side projects have functional core features that I use regularly but they aren't quite shippable. Building a GUI for others unfamiliar with the internal logic is incredibly difficult and tedious.

To be fair, these "others unfamiliar with the internal logic" can very well be yourself in six months.

Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)

#29

Post by wrongcards »

I've been running my side project - free ecards that are wrong for every occasion - (https://wrongcards.com) for eighteen years. I felt like the internet needed something like that, back in 2008. Back then, it was a tribute to the 90s era of terrible, awful ecards websites, about which I had become oddly nostalgic. It was also semi-intentionally a terrible idea from a SEO perspective (ecause, like, search engines aren't going to help anyone find what is ostensibly WRONG for every occasion) and I built the entire thing out of spite towards what I thought of as the 'new web'.

Now, almost 20 years later, I find I want to preserve something from the old days before it all looked like, well, gestures around wildly. It would be a relief not to maintain the site anymore. But I feel like I'd be disappointing a lot of people, as well. I have no idea how long I'm going to keep this going.

Post reply on HN