It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
robbowen.digital
It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
1–10 of 99 posts
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#2What's loading during the "loading" time? The network tab in developer tools doesn't show any transfers taking place during that time. It finishes getting content then shows the loading thing for a bit, then shows the content
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#3Abandoned 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.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#4My view is that side projects are not meant to be finished at all. Ideally they shouldn’t be more than an outlet for scratching a creative itch, and like any creative project, if your main motivation shifts from a personal goal to something vapid like testing the market viability of an idea that’s costing you a lot of time and effort to begin with then you’re going about it the wrong way.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#5Yea and also with AI I treat throwaway side projects as a way to develop my stack more so that for the next project I can just point Claude to it and say use this as reference instead of having to really work hard on thinking about architecture and scalability for every project . Also helps that you can later use sites at least as a way to get a boost in domain ranking
Here’s my own “graveyard” of projects just from the last few months: https://mesmer.tools/ that immediately got the highest domain ranking I have of all my sites(38), even ones making money
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#6Yeah. Sometimes it’s about knowing when to quit.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#7I agree, but still that little feeling of failure is painful.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#8me abandoning projects when progress is at 90%
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#9I like the idea of having an “end of life wrap-up" for half-finished side projects. Rather than just stopping and leaving them abandoned, you make something like a report on what you learned, what you built, and why you're stopping. Then it feels less like you've abandoned something outright.
Re: It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
#10On 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 new things with. When you're finding it a slog or you feel like you've learnt what what you need to it's fine to just dump it.
Actually finishing something is of course nice and for beginners in particular there's a lot of value in going from that it's mostly there just some loose ends to tie off stage to the actually done stage but you don't have to always do this (or indeed just do it in some select cases).