me abandoning projects when progress is at 90%
You might only be half-way if the remaining 10% follow the Pareto principle.
It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
31–40 of 99 posts
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#32No it's not OK
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#33I used to think about abandoning ghidra-delinker-extension.
It was a project that started innocently enough, but its domain is unbelievably complex. Recovering MIPS relocation spots from a Ghidra database sounds like an easy enough task, until you're confronted with behemoth functions that span thousands of instructions and undocumented psABI extensions that produces edge cases from Hell.
But then, someone contributed a PoC COFF exporter to go along with the PoC x86 ISA analyzer and after that the Windows video game decompilation picked it up, spreading by word of mouth. I've spent a ridiculously long time fixing bugs and learning about MSVC on-the-fly (quipping "there are lies, damned lies and the Microsoft Portable Executable and Common Object File Format Specification." on the decomp.me Discord server at one point). Then other architectures started creeping up in PRs, first x86_64 and later PowerPC. It's a bottomless pit of toolchains and platforms minutiae that demand perfection to pull off and would drive anyone stark raving mad.
It was bad enough that I let it sit for months at a time, only for someone to message me and fall back into it, then discover it got even more popular while I was away. I also somehow got invited to present a poster about it at ACM CCS 2025 in Taiwan, an absolutely insane story (how many hobbyists are invited to present something at a world-class academic conference on cyber-security?) that while very enlightening also physically wiped me out.
Copilot saved this project and I really mean it. Preparing artifacts, writing tests, performing investigations and large-scale refactorings: hours of grueling, soul-crushing menial work that I no longer have to subject myself to. Features that looked impossible like generating debugging symbols became within reach. The ironclad regression test suite happened to provide the perfect feedback loop. I still review the code and design, but I no longer burn myself out on this madness.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#34Most 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.
It could definitely happen after a few years and yes I have already had cases where I had to trace the code again to understand them. It is still a major hassle though!
I occasionally build simple CLIs that are immediately intuitive but GUIs are just too much work.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#35Hobbyist gamedevs: I only have one project that isn't abandoned, and that's my next one.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#36If 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…
Kindly disagree. If I don't want to work on a project anymore, I also don't want to spend time finding a new maintainer, or just take the responsibility to endorse a random person on the internet.
A fork solves that. And potential maintainers willing to work together on a fork can open an issue and talk about it. The reality being that more often than not, people think that they are willing to keep maintaining it, but in practice they just won't.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#37I would go one step further: everything is okay with your side project.
You don't want to open source it? Don't. You want to open source it but not build a community? Don't build a community. You don't even have to answer to requests.
You don't even have to disable the PR on your forge.
You don't even have to explain clearly in the README how you envision it and show any kind of commitment.
You do you, open sourcing is already nice.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#38I would go one step further: everything is okay with your side project. You don't want to open source it? Don't. You want to open source it but not build a community? Don't build a community. You don't even have to answer to requests. You don't even have to disable the PR on your forge. You don't even have to explain clearly in the README how you envision it and show any kind of commitment. You do you, open sourcing…
The reverse being that as a user, if you use an open source project written by someone you don't pay, don't behave as if you were a customer.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#39While I understand that by making the quiz app the author had learned everything and had no use afterwards, it's unfortunate to see it not published. My friend is learning Latvian and it would be perfect for her!
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#40Abandoned 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.
Why in the world would you get downvoted for this?