Ultimately software (especially these days) beyond "hello world" is never really finished until it's abondoned.
Yes. And all software is abandoned sooner or later (usually sooner). Acknowledging that is reality is a healthy perspective.
It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
51–60 of 99 posts
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#52That's pretty neat. I actually had to spend some effort to upskill in Latvian to pass high school and college, so I would have found utility in this project in its more-or-less working state. Even today, if I were to come back to Latvia I'd be massively screwed over by a variety of grammatical cases of a language I effectively haven't used in years.
You never know when your abandoned side project is somebody else's treasure. I guess open source + let somebody vibe code to completion is the right way.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#53On your side-project it's also ok to ignore best engineering practice, reinvent the wheel because you feel like it or make decisions based on what seems most interesting even if it's not a 'good' decision. The critical thing is what the author says: > always make sure that you're doing them for yourself, and for the right reasons For me my side projects are generally something to have fun with and something to learn…
On the contrary, my side projects tend to have the most strictest linter, test and CI suites. Why? You may ask.
I'll tell you. I forget stuff.
So when I pick up that Openweather tool after three years of not touching it to quickly change the output a bit, I can be pretty sure the overly robust scaffolding around the project won't let me break anything.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#54On your side-project it's also ok to ignore best engineering practice, reinvent the wheel because you feel like it or make decisions based on what seems most interesting even if it's not a 'good' decision. The critical thing is what the author says: > always make sure that you're doing them for yourself, and for the right reasons For me my side projects are generally something to have fun with and something to learn…
> On your side-project it's also ok to ignore best engineering practice, reinvent the wheel because you feel like it or make decisions based on what seems most interesting even if it's not a 'good' decision.
Pro tip for enjoying your life at work: this also applies to you work projects. Once you realize this, you can have a lot more fun at work and even coerce work projects to be more like your for-fun/side projects. Of course this is detrimental to the company as a whole, but your company almost definitely does not care about you and you might as well extract as much enjoyment as possible.
If your coworkers are actually passionate about programming (i.e. not drones or PM brains running flowchart to increase quarterly profit), you can even make work more enjoyable for them.
Things like unconventional language choices, over-engineering of systems, unusual coding styles, obscure protocol/library use, and of course a ton of NIH can really spice up a mundane codebase.
Even stretching an "easy" module into a masterfully crafted program and going 4x over estimation can be fun sometimes (without any of the bad design choices suggested above).
Yes I stand by this bad advice, and it's allowed me to play with so much technology I would never otherwise touch at day job.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#55Built a 4 startups and abandoned most every abandoned one thought me something I use today the graveyard is actually where my skills come from
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#56On your side-project it's also ok to ignore best engineering practice, reinvent the wheel because you feel like it or make decisions based on what seems most interesting even if it's not a 'good' decision. The critical thing is what the author says: > always make sure that you're doing them for yourself, and for the right reasons For me my side projects are generally something to have fun with and something to learn…
On the contrary, my side projects tend to have the most strictest linter, test and CI suites. Why? You may ask. I'll tell you. I forget stuff. So when I pick up that Openweather tool after three years of not touching it to quickly change the output a bit, I can be pretty sure the overly robust scaffolding around the project won't let me break anything.
That's the beauty of side projects, you get to decide and you don't have to care about working with others.
Really yearning for crafted code that meets every one of your perfect coding style guide and preference with green checks across a huge set of static analysis tools and a large test suite, go for it!
Tired of conforming to your ultra strict style guide at work and code reviews that go in endless circles nit picking about use of spacing or whatever? Let loose and stop having to care/worry so much about the details.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#57On your side-project it's also ok to ignore best engineering practice, reinvent the wheel because you feel like it or make decisions based on what seems most interesting even if it's not a 'good' decision. The critical thing is what the author says: > always make sure that you're doing them for yourself, and for the right reasons For me my side projects are generally something to have fun with and something to learn…
> On your side-project it's also ok to ignore best engineering practice, reinvent the wheel because you feel like it or make decisions based on what seems most interesting even if it's not a 'good' decision. Pro tip for enjoying your life at work: this also applies to you work projects. Once you realize this, you can have a lot more fun at work and even coerce work projects to be more like your for-fun/side projects.…
>> On your side-project it's also ok to ignore best engineering practice
> Pro tip for enjoying your life at work: this also applies to you work projects.
While this may be fun for you and your team, in my experience it makes maintenance more difficult for the next team that inherits the project.
If you're going to do this please consider if you'd find what you're passing on to be acceptable if instead you were inheriting it.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#58I'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 a…
Maybe you could try to find somebody to take over or help you maintain it?
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#59Abandoned 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.
Sometimes also the project is just 'done'. I many years ago made a windows screensaver (never released to anyone else). Just so I could have a '2001' screen saver. Basically in the background of the movie was all these screens flashing just weird status stuff. It was a cool aesthetic I kinda liked. Spent many weeks getting it to flash 'just right' and have the right animations for the right feel. Then LCD screens basically killed any need to have a screen saver. As basically instant on/off meant there was no reason to have the monitor running all the time. So the project was done.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On your side-project it's also ok to ignore best engineering practice, reinvent the wheel because you feel like it or make decisions based on what seems most interesting even if it's not a 'good' decision. Pro tip for enjoying your life at work: this also applies to you work projects. Once you realize this, you can have a lot more fun at work and even coerce work projects to be more like your for-fun/side projects.…
>> On your side-project it's also ok to ignore best engineering practice > Pro tip for enjoying your life at work: this also applies to you work projects. While this may be fun for you and your team, in my experience it makes maintenance more difficult for the next team that inherits the project. If you're going to do this please consider if you'd find what you're passing on to be acceptable if instead you were inher…
It might be more fun for you than your team, just saying