3 ms·
Ask HN: What to do when a project is "finished"?
I now consider an open source project I did, Umbrella JS [1], is "finished". By this I mean it has everything I wanted it to have, it's tested extensively* and documented heavily* .
My initial idea for the project was to use it myself and now I'm doing it and I love it. However I have a strong feeling that "I should keep improving it", but at the same time I think that this feeling is what makes projects become bloatware and too big/complex for their own good, which happened to me before [2].
The main thing is that if some people happen to find the project, I don't want them to think it's a "dead project". For sure I'll fix small (or big) bug reports and maintain it, but I expect the needed work in this aspect to be minimal.
So, what can I do now that this project is finished? Just leave it as it is or do you recommend other course of action? I can think getting more people using it might reveal bugs quicker (I don't mind if many or few people use it per se, but less bugs for sure is better).
Is this feeling of "I should keep making more things" normal after finishing a big-ish project? What do other people do in this situation?
[1] http://umbrellajs.com/ (when is a project finished?)
[2] http://picnicss.com/ (too many "broken features")
*at least for a 1-person project
- brudgers 11y agoIf a project is still fixing bugs, maybe "maintenance mode" is a better description than "finished". On the grand scale, there are "well known" projects that have gone more than a decade between releases: e.g. Enlightenment [1]. One of the things I think Clojure has done right is finishing things. Continuously changing a dependency [which is one aspect of all software] makes work for people relying on it downstream. Good luck. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_(software)