Do you want the thing you're building, or do you want to have built the thing you're building?
Or do you want to be building the thing. Hobby projects that take forever are usually fun to work on. They would not be hobby projects if they weren't.
Lessons from a never-ending personal project
31–40 of 80 posts
Re: Lessons from a never-ending personal project
#32My little programming project has been all about the data model, and a ton of fun. But I don't enjoy UX work at all. So if I can get it to a "mud fence" level of usability, I'll need people with a shred of aesthetic sensibility, since I'm done around vi with the UI.
There's a couple of 95% functional apps lying around here, that work fine but the UX is a total mess.
The active target audience (me) is fine with it. Other potentially interested parties don't know that they exist anyway. Next!
Re: Lessons from a never-ending personal project
#33I think I semi-successfully restored some sanity to a long running personal project.
I had added features nobody wanted(afaik), that were a hassle to maintain, and that I didn't have any use for.
I just axed them all. And I stopped adding features without real use cases I actually planned on doing. I was spending hours a week but the project was getting crappier instead of better.
With all that gone, I had time to add features I actually wanted, and clean up the architecture to make that possible.
Re: Lessons from a never-ending personal project
#34Good article on the basic nature of software projects, they never seem to end unless you decide them to end. When to do that ? Who the hell knows, it took me about 10 years for my own project to reach a state where I could say "This is done now, I am satisfied with the goals I set to reach 10 years ago".. And even that came through because I was exhausted working on the project, spending so much time on it. I think y…
What has helped me (and this may sound like an absurd suggestion as it creates even more work) is to split up all my projects into a public- and a private-facing part, and trying to follow the UNIX principle ("Write programs that do one thing and do it well.").
For all the things I want to share to the world, I'll make it into a small project that from the start has stated goals and non-goals. If there is some divergence from what I need personally from it, I'll have private fork (sometimes also just so I can work on it in a "fast and ugly" manner). By splitting them up consciously, the public and the private part can fulfill their individual goals a lot better ("polished"+finishable public shared part; tailored to my needs perpetual imperfect private part).
That also works surprisingly well for non-code things, like blog posts, where my private versions have a lot more references and detail tidbits sprinkled in, that would overwhelm the target audience of the public version of the post (mostly because it would take too much time to work it into the post in a good way). I guess that's also not a too uncommon phenomenon in the arts, with director's cuts of movies and additional mixes of music existing parallel to the commercially published version.
Re: Lessons from a never-ending personal project
#354th point about writing stuff down leads to another fun exercise. If you care about an idea but don't want to spend time doing the thing, write up a plan for how to do it. Then consider that to be your work product, and never look at the file again. Good way to get something out of your system, and maybe 3 years later you open it back up and go for it.
great suggestion
Re: Lessons from a never-ending personal project
#36Life is a never ending personal project…
Re: Lessons from a never-ending personal project
#37this was such a good read and hearing what other people think and feel about working on personal projects just lifts up my spirit
Re: Lessons from a never-ending personal project
#38Good article on the basic nature of software projects, they never seem to end unless you decide them to end. When to do that ? Who the hell knows, it took me about 10 years for my own project to reach a state where I could say "This is done now, I am satisfied with the goals I set to reach 10 years ago".. And even that came through because I was exhausted working on the project, spending so much time on it. I think y…
In my professional experience, software is never finished, it's just that at some point it's decided to rewrite or replace a piece of software and decomission the old.
Re: Lessons from a never-ending personal project
#39> Finishing anything is a miracle in and of itself. A huge shoutout to anyone who’s ever done anything to completion at all.
He is writing about art (creative writing), as opposed to commercial product. Art is fairly inward-focused, and its goals can be a lot “fuzzier” than product. I was an artist, in my Yute. At one time, I wanted to actually make a living from it.
But artists finish, all the time. Some, treat their art as a product, and that seems to help, but they also risk commoditization of their creativity.
I’ve spent pretty much my entire life, shipping software. That’s been for externally-imposed deadlines, usually as part of an integrated team, with synchronized milestones.
As he mentions, that helps a lot.
Since working on my own stuff, I’ve had to drastically reduce the scale of my work, and practice self-discipline that, I suspect, many folks here would consider extreme.
But I still finish stuff. Finishing stuff is actually part of the personal satisfaction that I get. It’s an art, in itself.
Re: Lessons from a never-ending personal project
#40when you start getting musing on the meta of the project - philosophizing, looking at yourself in third person, maybe figuring a way to optimize projects like this, etc. I don't know if that's where true wisdom starts, or if it's procrastination at work.
Good point. Anytime you take a step back and reflect on things at a meta-level you are on the path to Wisdom. Procrastination is not bad at this level but merely a technique. Studying the System from a third person pov while being embedded in it is the foundation of Philosophy. The fact that our Society expects us to conform to and obey certain validated Social Mores does not mean that they are right.