Excellent post.
> Sheds are never finished. You just decide you are done.
This is what everybody should take from this. It's easy to iterate over and over again.
And btw your (unfinished) shed looks pretty good!
I was stuck on a side project for 5 years – how I finished it (2020)
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Re: I was stuck on a side project for 5 years – how I finished it (2020)
#42> I learned how to design things people actually want.
I enjoy designing and making things I actually want. If someone else 'gets it', that's okay. If not pfffft.
> won’t amount to much.
Don't want to sound crass, but very very little of anything truly 'amounts to much', not in its own time, or ever. Now and then (rarely enough) it takes decades or centuries for creative work to find its audience. What's behind 'what people want'?
"You see, ya can't please everyone / So ya got to please yourself." And if the world ever feels lucky? Lucky them.
Re: I was stuck on a side project for 5 years – how I finished it (2020)
#43You can still believe that a project which becomes a shed is desired by an audience, however niche, and not care as much about getting popularity, which gives you an excuse to keep working. You can let a project that you still get enjoyment out of consume the rest of your life. It's scary that the thing you willingly do to get away from obligation and 9 to 5 work can be at the same time the most fulfilling and most d…
Your very insightful comment seems to embrace a principal I see rarely remembered but one I find a kind of lost achievement of the Enlightenment- there are things worth doing for their own sake, not requiring further justification. For me this became clear about so many meaningful parts of life after finally starting to understand what Thomas Nagel meant in his essay The Absurd.
Re: I was stuck on a side project for 5 years – how I finished it (2020)
#44I’ve made two side projects so far. The first was a visual JVM profiler that was very complex and educational/intellectually satisfying to build but when I finished it I had little interest or know-how or capital to invest in growing + marketing it. The second one was as simplest as I could possibly make it. I had basically 2 hours per weekend in 2021 (kids & all) and I rigorously stuck within my estimated scope. I w…
...so what was the app?
I suspect that, when it comes down to it, the cake-iest of all apps is a "todo" app :)
My contribution is https://www.chronos-desk.com/
Personally I wanted a task app that was local-first[1] (integrated with my desktop; one-time license/no subscription fee; no saas/web browser), had great keyboard shortcut support, and had first-class support for task estimates.
Re: I was stuck on a side project for 5 years – how I finished it (2020)
#45I'm working on a project that's been going on at least 10 years, not sure exactly how long. It's an engine to play the game of go that uses something like genetic algorithms to produce generations of "go-bots". I have sets of go-bots fighting each other for dominancy pretty much 24/7 now. Deepmind and alphazero have nothing to worry about, though. I play them against the gnugo program as a test of their worthiness so…
I feel like you must have seen it given that you're working on this but just in case, the AlphaGo Documentary (2017) was quite good. I bet you'd enjoy it.
I actually haven't seen it. I need to. At first I didn't want to know too much about go strategy or how other programmers have attacked the problem because I wanted a sort of naive untainted view of things. Which was easy for me, because I'm not much of a go player. Now I'm pretty much roped in to what I'm doing, so I should watch that documentary. I'm playing around. The AlphaGo devs are the real deal.
Re: I was stuck on a side project for 5 years – how I finished it (2020)
#46Can relate... Scary thing is that probably millions of people can too. Imagine if all these projects saw the daylight one day