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How to Ship Side Projects

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Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#31

Post by joshontheweb »

shortoncash wrote: post #8

This was a good blog post. I have shipped side projects before. What helps me the most is to always have some really, really tiny incremental goal every week that's achievable. This way, there's always some momentum of sorts, even if some weeks are far less productive than others. It's when momentum dies completely that projects don't come out of the abyss.

Same here. I use a trello board and discipline myself to complete at least one task a day. No matter how small. This usually leads to me getting in the zone and completing a bunch of other tasks. If not, its ok. There's tomorrow.

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#32

Post by sumanthvepa »

The biggest problem I've had with side projects in my past jobs was that my employment agreement was all encompassing and I would require my employer's explicit permission to release the project. So I pretty much stayed away from them except as purely throwaway learning exercises.

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#33

Post by jamescostian »

reedlaw wrote: post #20

Sorry but those animated gifs distracted me from reading. Normally I will scroll things like that off the page but when they come so close to each other all I see is the movement.

Personally, I found them to be topical and slightly more engaging than text. They appear at the top of each section, so I thought of them as helpful summaries of each section as well as comic relief. I felt like they encouraged me to finish the next section instead of leaving the page early.

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#34

Post by SwellJoe »

logicallee wrote: post #25
SwellJoe wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'd need to see some evidence that that is a more effective strategy than starting small. My biggest enemy is always analysis paralysis. The bigger the project, the less likely I am to ever even start, much less finish anything. Likewise, when I do start, if the scope is too big, I'll flit from concept to concept never really finishing any of them. But, when I have a very small, concrete, and actionable item,…

>I think I'd need to see some evidence that that is a more effective strategy than starting small. "To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything use…

Counter-argument: GNU was a copy of an existing reasonably well-engineered and well-documented solution, in almost every piece. Sure, GNU utilities often improved or extended the standard, but the design already existed. Further, GNU is a system of many discrete parts. Each piece could be built by an individual without tight interdependence on other pieces. That's an MVP. Small, useful, pieces, that add up to something bigger.

I believe GNU is evidence of the opposite point you're trying to make. Unless your point is actually "think big, but build in small, manageable pieces", but if that's your argument, that wasn't how I understood it.

Ambition is not antithetical to building in small pieces. In fact, I think most people have to start small.

While we're on the subject, I'll quote another kinda famous first announcement:

Hello everybody out there using minix –

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#35

Post by Pyxl101 »

I wanted to read this post but I couldn't get past the light grey font which was very hard to read. Illegibly thin and light fonts like this are borderline hostile to users, and frustrate me every time I encounter them.

I'm sorry I have nothing more constructive than that to contribute.

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#36

Post by TeMPOraL »

arthurjj wrote: post #4

Limiting the scope can't be emphasized enough if you're married with kids. I've failed to ship 6-7 side projects because of limits to my free time. The best side project I've successfully shipped, besides blogging, was limited to 2 "features" one of which I already had from a failed project.

So basically, try to group anything into smallest possible self-contained utilities, until you grow a pile of them big enough that your next project can be basically assembled from them...

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#37

Post by logicallee »

SwellJoe wrote: post #34
logicallee wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think I'd need to see some evidence that that is a more effective strategy than starting small. "To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything use…

Counter-argument: GNU was a copy of an existing reasonably well-engineered and well-documented solution, in almost every piece. Sure, GNU utilities often improved or extended the standard, but the design already existed. Further, GNU is a system of many discrete parts. Each piece could be built by an individual without tight interdependence on other pieces. That's an MVP. Small, useful, pieces, that add up to somethi…

>Unless your point is actually "think big, but build in small, manageable pieces", but if that's your argument, that wasn't how I understood it.

Unfortunately, that was exactly my point!

I've made a modification to my original comment: I've italicized the word "approach" now, to emphasize that this is just the kind of attitude you should have.

Basically, my main point is that if you don't overengineer a perfect and very ambitious solution, you're unlikely to ship anything - but if you do, then you are more likely to ship it, even though obviously you will start shipping some small part only.

It would be interesting if there were some way to do a double-blind experiment, giving a thousand people a couple of different approaches and to see who ends up shipping :).

in short, I'm saying, by targeting something huge and overengineered, you are more likely to ship something (anything at all) - versus targeting a minimum; which leaves you less likely to ship anything worthwhile. I am not saying by targeting something huge and overengineered, you are going to ship something huge and overengineered. Rather, that you will end up shipping a small part of it. (And that this approach is better than the alternative.)

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#38

Post by rokhayakebe »

kalid wrote: post #12

Shameless plug, I just launched an overhaul to a side project today ( https://instacalc.com ). The biggest impetus was having a friend using the old version who pinged me with some feature requests. It reminded me that the service can help people I know directly and gave me a huge boost of motivation. If friends and family are using it, you'll want to help them out :).

Super awesome. You can save Calcs.

Ways to 1Million in Yearly Recurring Revenue: https://instacalc.com/50021

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#39

Post by garysieling »

To add another shameless plug, I built a search engine for lectures (https://www.findlectures.com).

A great thing about this is that there is no point where it's "done", as long as it has enough content to be useful. As I get more data, it unlocks tons of opportunities for mini-projects. Writing a blog has been a good side-project for the same reason.

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#40

Post by anchpop »

rcdmd wrote: post #29
reedlaw wrote: post #20

Sorry but those animated gifs distracted me from reading. Normally I will scroll things like that off the page but when they come so close to each other all I see is the movement.

We're now coming full circle [1]... Chrome's inspect element followed by the Delete key works wonders though. [1] http://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/

There's a chrome extension I find very useful that adds this to the right click menu called "f*ck overlays" [1]

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fck-overlays/ppedo...

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