17 ms·

The Resistance Is Real – Why Side Projects Are So Hard

489 points by startlaunch 8y ago

ThomPete 8y ago
I have launched several side projects a couple of them financially successful. They have had plenty of bugs in them and I got several angry emails about various things, but over the time I have fixed them as they come in. It's a great way of prioritizing what of that last 20% you should fix. In other words. Ship as fast as possible, treat it as a project then over time improve. If you have something of value people will use it even when it's not optimal.
ravenstine 8y ago
I've found that the heart of the problem is... money. With money comes time. If funds are sufficient, most of those whispers are diminished. Let's say one is sitting on a pile of money: > A year! Why haven’t you shipped yet? I would not be bothered by this if I could continue to fund the project. > This is boring. Just shelve this project and move on to something fun & exciting. With money could come the possibility of hiring someone to do the boring stuff, or making the project look professional enough that it attracts contributors who think it has a future. > This niche isn’t big enough. You should change the target to developers? Marketers? Sales? If the project has enough money, course correction should be much less of a risk. > No one will actually use this. / Will designers really find this useful? / What if you launch and no one finds it valuable? Ok, this would be a worry no matter how much money one has. Although I suppose it's less of a risk if a project is small. I recently set out to work on a side project with virtually no funding. I wouldn't call it a mistake as I've learned a lot about myself and the nature of doing a side project full-time, but money is a biggie no matter how much motivation one can muster. Maybe if I had spent less money on fancy lunches when I worked for a company, for example, I could have bought a lot more time to finish what I was working on. Now I'm at a point where I have to focus almost all my time on finding employment because the electricity doesn't pay itself. Next time, I've gotta learn how to raise money for what I do instead of believing I can self-fund it. lol
- segmondy 8y ago
  It's not about money, it's about time, flow & motivation. Time is the biggest obstacle, side project implies that there's another full time job. With a full time job and other obligations such as family or volunteer activities. Without enough long stretch of time, it's difficult to get into a flow state. Without enough flow while working on any project motivation wanes. The secret becomes figuring out how to manage your small chunk of time, how to get into flow fast, suspend it and resume it across time and how to keep the motivation up if you miss out on flow.
  - zzzcpan 8y ago
    No, in the end it's pretty much all about the money. And not just funding, but about making money. I mean imagine that you did finish your side project and did ship it, now what? Does it become sustainable the moment you ship it, does it pay your bills, does it maintain itself, pay for its own infrastructure? Of course not. You still need to make money just to keep it and yourself alive, and quite a bit of money.
    - segmondy 8y ago
      end goal for all side projects is not money, end goal sometimes is scratching your own itch and using it, conquering a challenge you encountered, learning whatever you set out to do, etc. I have built 100+ side projects, most of them have NOTHING to do with money. People write poems, stories, music, paint, build all sorts of things for the fun of it, and guess what? many of us code for the joy of it too. Keeping a side project going is pretty much $0-$5/month. if you already have a VPS, you can just run it on there, or you can run it at your own server or on a raspberry pi, you can even run it on many cloud servers for free. Using serverless for instance, you can run many side project on AWS for free.
- Lordarminius 8y ago
  Could not agree more.
- akvadrako 8y ago
alwaysreading 8y ago
Steven Pressfield’s War of Art (mentioned in the post) is such a great read when you’re stuck - https://amzn.to/2FF9Nts https://amzn.to/2FF9Nts
- toyg 8y ago
  Is it? Not according to this review: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/1936891026/R1PIVDBK0NS9D3/ref=cm_cr_dp_mb_rvw_6?ie=UTF8&cursor=6 https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/1936891026/R1PIVDBK0NS9D... When God entered the picture, I lost all interest.
  - tlb 8y ago
    The book invokes the pagan notion of a pantheon of gods, rather than the Judeo-Christian God. He describes a ritual where he propitiates the Muses (the gods of creativity) before sitting down to write. You might find it easier to swallow, because when people invoke the J-C God they often mean it completely literally, while the Muses are clearly allegorical. But to get through the book, you have to suspend your rational empiricism quite a few times. Perhaps no more than to read The Odyssey or Macbeth, where internal human struggles are illustrated with supernatural imagery.
    - atentaten 8y ago
      This. The Muses and Resistance are simply tools to help grasp and externalize the conflicting forces within you.
    - jen729w 8y ago
      Not true. A quick search of my Kindle version shows references to “God” – the one we all think of as God – twice on p34 then on p86, p109, and so on. The author believes in God and isn’t afraid of letting you know about it.
  - mattnewport 8y ago
    Many of the greatest human achievements in both art and science have had explicitly religious motivations. I'm an atheist myself but it seems like it might be worth exploring / understanding that if one wants to achieve something great. I've no idea if this book is helpful for that - I've never read it though I have seen it recommended several times - but it seems like an interesting topic to explore regardless of one's personal religious beliefs. Despite my own lack of belief, to my taste religiously inspired art and architecture of the past seems to reach a level of greatness that seems missing from much of the modern God-free stuff.
simonw 8y ago
The absolute best advice on side projects (and full startups) I know of is that classic quote attributed to Reid Hoffman: "If You're Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late" These days I even apply it to my blog entries. No one else cares about those details you are obsessing over. What matters is that your product lets people do something that they couldn't do before - or in the case of blog entries that it teaches them something they didn't know already.
- freedomben 8y ago
  I agree mostly with this, but I would emphasize that your first release must be usable. I've seen a few promising products get released too early by people pushing to "ship early, ship often," etc, only to crash and burn because they quickly developed a reputation for being buggy pieces of crap. Once you have a slate of bad reviews on an app store, it's difficult to fix.
  - TravHatesMe 8y ago
    I agree. If users have a poor experience, they'll be less likely to try it again after you've polished it. I'm sure there's a balance between the two, but "if you're not embarrassed" is too strong of a statement (I suppose it's an exaggeration to send a message). Plus, embarrassment is subjective.
  - happybuy 8y ago
    > Once you have a slate of bad reviews on an app store, it's difficult to fix. Not really. Take note of what the bad reviews say, fix the issues, release a new version and repeat. Once you've got to the point that you've resolved the majority of the problems noted, release a version in the App Store which resets all your ratings. If you keep going - from that point on - you should be getting better reviews and ratings which will make it a more popular app and these later reviews will eventually overwhelm the earlier lower ratings. Also once the app is actually objectively good, use SKStoreReviewController.requestReview to prompt for reviews from users to encourage more and more good ratings. It could be said that a poorly rated app is simply one which hasn't listened to feedback and focused on constant improvements.
brbrodude 8y ago
I'm three years in.
- napsterbr 8y ago
  Four here. Cheers!
  - HDevo 8y ago
    Hello, eight here. Good luck!
Kaveren 8y ago
> "Re-written the code base 4 times (Laravel, Vanilla JS, React, then back to Vanilla JS)." The path of least resistance is to research all available options, pick one, and see the project through, not to jump back and forth. It's a side project, but still, this isn't going to make it any easier. That aside, the side project looks like it could see a good degree of success. I wouldn't use it because it seems like it's way too simple a feature to outsource, but then again, many companies also pay for simple customer / customer-service instant messaging services.
- dukoid 8y ago
  Simpler said than done: Researching something in the abstract might lead to different results than actually using it...
- pdimitar 8y ago
  I fully agree with the premise but many times, it's just way too hard to actually predict the production problems you will have even with your most favourite tech. Truth is that while working in a corp you can't see the big picture of seeing a project through from start to finish. For example, I am helping on mostly good faith -- and at about 30% of what I'd normally charge -- a friend to bootstrap their website / platform and even though I use language and tech I very much like and I am the dictator of the backend, 95% of the work is extremely boring and it's just "make this controller, make this API endpoint, wire this object to that other object, integrate this payment provider" etc... Combine with the universally bad deployment experience of basically 99% of the languages out there and things aren't really that glorious even if the tech is much better than what you worked with your entire life beforehand. What I am saying is -- even for every experienced programmers it's very hard to make an accurate prediction. But if there's one metric I always use, it's this one: "does the tech stand in my way to productivity and waste my time with details I shouldn't care about?" -- if so, I try to ditch it (not possible with JS but still, there are transpiled languages and frameworks that make things better).
barefootford 8y ago
I've found that setting a very hard deadline, ideally with some money on the line, is the best way to guarantee something gets done. It seems like this should be the authors next step. To get my last video out, I sent a friend $200 through Square Cash and said "Only send this back to me if I have X published by X hour on X date". It worked! I definitely feel resistance in the last stages of side projects, but I don't necessarily buy Pressfields reasons for why it's there. Still valuable to know it will be there ahead of time though, regardless of what its origins are.
ungzd 8y ago
Side projects are hard when you are using "best practices" from Google and Facebook, choosing the best and "most right" js framework, even landing page looks like landing page of "best unicorn VC companies".
- robterrell 8y ago
  For me, it's easy to complicate things by saying "for this side project I'm going to learn new thing X" -- using 'learning something new' to help justify the time spent, but usually screwing up the project as a result.
  - amoitnga 8y ago
    So true. I've done it, I know it. It's very dangerous.
soneca 8y ago
My inconsequential guess is that he only not launched it yet because (i) he thinks the technology he uses matters more than the product and (ii) he is building features that should not be included in the first version. I was able to launch my side-project (the for-profit bootstrapping biz type), a web app, in 7 months even being a junior frontend developer. I chose the tech with the sole criteria of how easy it would be for me to build it (I went with Ember, that I use on my day-job, and Rails). And the whole time I was constantly thinking hard about a feature and then realizing "I don't need that for now...". I then would write the feature idea in a card on my backlog (a Github's project board) and move on to the next important feature. What I guess is making so hard for him is not the diligence, commitment or motivation, but the product decisions he has to make (and I speculate he is making the wrong ones).
swsieber 8y ago
I'm about halfway to launching a side project (I seem to be close than 50%, but there's always the 90-10 rule). It's been fun. I've been writing the backend in rust, using squire for storage, and actix-web for the server framework. The front end is plain html without a lick of js. And my css is really just compiled scss. I'm happy to report I've only engaged in a small bit of yak-shaving (writing a custom derive for defining APIs I need to hi from my backend for integration purposes) and only a small bit of framework churn (I switched web server frameworks because I wanted an abstraction that wasn't ergonomic/available in the initial one i had chosen). And it's been fun. The best part is that even if it flops, my wife and I will still use it. Edit: I've only been at it for a couple months
- echelon 8y ago
  What are you working on? I'm interested in Rust projects, especially web ones.
  - swsieber 8y ago
    Integrating SMS (Twilio/Plivo) with Google Spreadsheets for Budgeting purposes. Basically allows people with custom budgets to get an easier form of transaction recording. I had been using warp, but I wanted to write a custom middleware for some session / cookie management, but ran into trouble, so I moved to actix-web. The google api crates also didn't seem to compile/work right for me, so that's why I wrote a custom derive. Basically, it allows you to define a struct that represents an endpoint, and you can just mark what get's included in the query, body, or in the url with some nice interpolation. And then I defined a endpoint processor that can take that and execute it, deserializing it. I implemented that for the reqwest client and for one of my custom structs, a google api token. Here's an example of what a marked up struct looks like: https://gist.github.com/samsieber/d2efec774320c0af01ee72cb0958c9a3 https://gist.github.com/samsieber/d2efec774320c0af01ee72cb09... . It's a little rough around the edges, but I think by the time I'm done it'll have acquired enough polish to release it on crates.io - it's been super useful to eliminate a lot of the fiddliness I had been doing with making requests.
- albertgoeswoof 8y ago
catchmeifyoucan 8y ago
Usually, after I build everything out, I debate whether I want to publish my work or not. I find that to be very hard. What motivates me is at least sending it out to my friends and getting validation that this is good and I should share it. So that pushes me to do the extra mile for polish.
heipei 8y ago
At this point in my life I've started to believe that whenever you talk to someone who is "passionate about technology X and clean architectures" or "wants to work on challenging technical problems" is ultimately doomed to fail when setting out to create a (for-profit, bootstrapped) business. This is a strong opinion and there is certainly a spectrum for this mindset, but at the most extreme your mindset should be more along the lines of "all technology ultimately sucks, let's figure out the most straightforward way and the least amount of effort and headaches so we can create value for our customers so they, and we, can get off that damn computer screen and enjoy the fruits of our labor". If you're saying "I'm passionate about delivering great products to users" or even "I'm passionate about making money" (I respect that) then technology becomes the tool you unfortunately have to wield to arrive at that goal. Note that this attitude only applies to people who want to take ownership and deliver a fully functional product. There's tons of great people who are in it for the sheer enjoyment of working with technology, they all will have a great time working on challenging problems at one of the many tech companies. And there's a few people who can both enjoy technical challenges but also switch to dumb and boring crunch mode when it's demanded by the task at hand.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Passionate about outcomes, not the means. The only thing is by not giving a smack about the tech is that you risk looking like one of those 'impostors' by the nerd-crew who think everything is about the tech. Also ... there are intangible benefits from our hard-core nerd outs. Let's be real: 1/2 of the tech we used may not have been invented if it were not for some dude doing it 'just cause'.
  - wolco 8y ago
    It depends on your customer. If you happen to sell api services make sure the public face is at an acceptable level. In the backend make it work. Later make it perfect, scalable, etc when new features demand it.
  - monsieurbanana 8y ago
    Half is a very, very conservative estimate. Hell, Linux was made 'just cause'.
yjhoney 8y ago
I know I'm nitpicking here, but I find it annoying when people say things like: "If you’ve yet to read these x books, do yourself a favor and buy them today". Did myself a "favor" a few times in the past and every single time I only read the first couple of pages and ended up giving them away. Or worse, I get FOMO so I keep those books around and it becomes clutter around my small apartment. Its hard to focus and read the rest of what the author has to say if he makes blanket statements like that.
- toyg 8y ago
  Worse, the mentioned books are some veiled Christian propaganda, as mentioned in this review: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/1936891026/R1PIVDBK0NS9D3/ref=cm_cr_dp_mb_rvw_6?ie=UTF8&cursor=6 https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/1936891026/R1PIVDBK0NS9D...
- user68858788 8y ago
  Don't forget the affiliate link! It is annoying and, IMO, reduces the credibility of the author by quite a bit.
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  Qualify your advisors. It's not a wholly terrible strategy to use peoples recommendations but it usually serves me fairly well to only take recommendations by people I hold in high regard.
egfx 8y ago
The trick is finding a problem you have a passion for. That way, no matter what or how long, it won't feel like work. Your side project is the sabbatical.
- dukoid 8y ago
  The passionate part is the proof of concept. After that, you can decide between persistence and passion for the next project... :) I think keeping the scope as small and simple as possible might be even more important than passion.
- coldtea 8y ago
  The problem is that whatever the problem you're trying to solve, the parts you have a passion for are only small parts of the overall solution. It's the rest that gets you (e.g. you might like coding the backend algorithms but hate UI work). And even if you love all parts, you'll probably still hate the minutiae that goes into a finished product.
- rpeden 8y ago
  The downside to this approach is that it can kill the passion for the thing you were passionate about. Also, I've noticed that real world solutions to problems tend to include lots of schleps that are excruciatingly boring, but necessary. The longer I do this kind of work, the more strongly I believe that the people who are most likely to see a project through to completion are the ones who have the stone cold professionalism - or just plain stubbornness - to grind though the boring stuff instead of just faffing around on the bits of the problem that they're passionate about. I think a side project that's just about indulging a passion is totally fine. But a side project that is also a product that makes money will almost require lots of pieces that definitely feel like work.
pmontra 8y ago
A note to the author: this is by far the whitest font I saw on so many light gray text on white background sites. Why? It's beyond readability.
- Ace17 8y ago
  Yeah, it's unreadable. Too bad, the article seemed interesting.
jammygit 8y ago
The real reason they're hard is the employment contracts that forbid them (or surrender their ownership, which is almost worse)
- wmurmann 8y ago
  Just because you sign a contract doesn’t mean it’s enforceable.
  - albertgoeswoof 8y ago
    Bingo- has there actually been a recorded case of this happening to someone who’s working on an unrelated project? Obviously if you copy your employers product or do something very similar it’s suspect, but if you work for a defense contractor and build a social network for cats in your spare time, they’re not going to care
    - jammygit 8y ago
      Are there recorded cases of this happening where the employee won? I've heard of those 'used a company laptop to work on the project so the employer is out for you' cases, but never read much in detail.
  - jammygit 8y ago
    I don't know how to even begin figuring out whether something is enforceable or not. I read a news article that Canada isn't that protective of employees in this sense, but forget the details.
  - james_s_tayler 8y ago
    I was discussing this with a lawyer yesterday and she had something interesting to say about that. At least in my jurisdiction both parties must act in good faith. This includes knowingly signing an invalid contract and blowing off some obligations in it on the premise that you didn't have to comply any way because it wasn't valid in the first place. In such cases it can be construed that you did act in good faith and a judgement made against you.
Dowwie 8y ago
Purpose pushes us forward. Find yours.
csytan 8y ago
Reading this blog post, I see two skills in conflict: 1. Ship now, ship often 2. Strive for perfection The first one is required for entrepreneurs. Your "work <--> reward" iteration cycle should be as short as possible, and should end with the customer handing you money. The second one is a skill that rewards knowledge acquisition, and can be especially helpful for those looking to improve their skillset in order to move up the career ladder. It's also an iteration cycle, but the reward often doesn't end with directly delivering value to a customer. Lastly, I think that startup media (Tech Crunch, YC, etc) has a lot to do with this. There are way fewer stories told about bootstrapping something long term, compared to stories about successful startups hitting home runs. The reality is that the bulk of the work will be after you launch, and will likely require continuing effort in the form of years rather than months.
- strig 8y ago
  Maybe it could be rewritten as: 1. Ship now 2. Ship often, and strive for (eventual) perfection
- enraged_camel 8y ago
  IME, the core of your product, the part that your customers use regularly, should work perfectly. It’s okay for the other stuff to not be perfect.
  - Swizec 8y ago
    On the other hand: if nobody is buying your product, it doesn't matter how perfectly it works.
    - enraged_camel 8y ago
      There is some truth to that, but most people want to try out a product before they buy it. So if they run into bugs during that trial period, then your conversion rate will suffer.
- opportune 8y ago
  Honestly I think ship now ship often deserves an asterisk by it. When you’re designing large and intricate back ends for a system that needs it, and you’re a PM who only sees things in terms of end-user features, it’s easy to set yourself up for failure trying to ship so fast that you accumulate technical debt faster than you can ever pay it down (because you underengineer the underlying platform but need to support it forever to meet SLA, and good luck arguing for a complete rewrite) That is, no mantra above a certain level of abstraction should be adhered to too strictly. Sometimes it’s better to ship 3 months later if it means 3 years of way simpler support and scaling
madeuptempacct 8y ago
I am amused by how easy I find it to work on corporate drone work 8-12 hours a day + during my vacation, but have a hard time forcing myself to work even a couple of hours on my own stuff. I think it's because in the end, it's hard to really believe it's not all for nothing.
- faitswulff 8y ago
  > I think it's because in the end, it's hard to really believe it's not all for nothing. For myself, at least, I feel that drone work is obviously for naught, which makes side project failures that much more demoralizing.
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  I’m literally laughing out loud. I thought I recognized your username: you were one of the ones calling Boss as a Service a complete scam for losers who have psychological issues motivating themselves. And yet here you are, talking about how it’s easy to work on boring corporate stuff where you have a boss, but it’s nearly impossible to motivate yourself on your own stuff. Which is exactly the issue that something like Boss as a Service is there to solve. It’s so perfect that I’m pretty convinced this is a subtle troll on your part.
  - madeuptempacct 8y ago
    Hmm, saw this just before heading out. It's not a troll. It has nothing to do with having a boss, it has to do with knowing you are getting a guaranteed paycheck and knowing you need that to survive or maintain a certain lifestyle.
    - wst_ 8y ago
      Not OP and I think too it's not about the boss. But marketing and sales as a service could be a help. I guess this is at least a part of the job that investors are doing for the startups. Maybe not marketing and sales but guidance to get a ROI.
  - draw_down 8y ago
encoderer 8y ago
Really, you probably don’t want to hear this, but you need to ship. You have probably overbuilt already. The reason I’ve basically embraced a lifestyle with a “second job” is that it’s enormously rewarding both intellectually and financially. Over 4 years the business has grown from a “hobby that made me a few bucks” to meaningfully changing my families financial outlook. There is no way I could have sustained the investment without those two sources of reward.
miguelmota 8y ago
My philosophy has always been "make it run, make it right, make it fast". If it runs and is functional it's good enough to ship and release. Making the codebase pretty and optimizations come afterwards
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pascalxus 8y ago
IMHO tech is the easy part. The two hardest parts of side projects are: 1. Finding a solvable problem that hasn't already been done a million times. 2. Getting users and breaking even on user acquisition costs. If you're re-writing your project 4 times, it means you're having fun or learning(nothing wrong with that). But for those that are building a business, it is about delivering value to end customers.
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  IMHO, only half of number one is a problem, because something that’s been done a million times has proven repeatedly that there’s a market there. It might be too competitive, but it might be easier to find a profitable niche than you’d think.
  - buboard 8y ago
    it may mean that there are users , but no money to make
- buboard 8y ago
  > breaking even on user acquisition cost this has become increasingly hard as we are short of options for monetization,as startups focus on being acquired since many years ago > it means you're having fun or learning I guess developers look at the huge salaries and decide that a job with the latest qualifications is a more profitable investment of their time in the medium term.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
    this has become increasingly hard I take it you weren't around back when the only realistic method of finding customers was magazine advertising and a 1.5"x2" ad in a tech magazine was $500/month with no guarantee that anyone would even notice it? look at the huge salaries For a lot of us it's not about the money; it's about being to live by your own rules.
- preommr 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
blizkreeg 8y ago
Don’t mean to be mean (i’ve been there) but this is the money line “Re-written the code base 4 times (Laravel, Vanilla JS, React, then back to Vanilla JS).” Is the goal to ship or play? If latter, no harm done, else that’s your resistance, nothing else.
sdenton4 8y ago
My breakthrough this year has been working on a side project that really really isn't just me. It's a collaboration with a small research group at a university. I do my stuff mainly outside of work, and generally am improving the group's overall research bandwidth, rather than taking a full project on all by myself. Having some social obligation to keep the relationship going is enough to overcome a lot of the little hurdles, and having some excited feedback when I make some genuine progress is super helpful. It's also been a great chance to just meet lots of lovely people in the community, and having the communication has helped me make progress much faster than I would have on my own. And best of all, I get to have the feeling of doing some real Science, in an important but generally underfunded problem space. It's been great.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  Would you be comfortable to share what you are working on? I'd love to be a part of something like that... but definitely don't have the network for it.
  - sdenton4 8y ago
    I spent about a year or so reading and reimplementing interesting papers around machine learning on audio - probably six months was actually getting to know signal processing in a real way and learning tensorflow, and then some months doing seq2seq for ASR slightly more seriously. And now I've been doing things that you can find in the lifeclef or dcase competitions, with a group that focuses on one of the sub tasks.
vexangel 8y ago
Just started a side project and hit all of these ideas. For me they just aren't pronounced enough to be stopping points at this early stage. Hope this helps!
CM30 8y ago
So true, I'm constantly plagued by those thoughts to stop whenever I work on anything, in case it's either not good enough for the public, boring, not gonna sell/find users, etc, and every minute I spend working on my projects is a battle between declaring I'll actually finish them this time around and a feeling of 'relax, you can take more time here'. That said, they're not the only issues. In fact, I'd say what hurts me more than the nagging thoughts in the article is a deadly combination of OCD esque perfectionism and a tendency towards feature/scope creep that really needs a good project managing laying down limits. This means endless reams of time is spent on 'nice to have' features that keep wasting more and more time, like a one person version of Duke Nukem Forever. And then even more time is spent procrastinating because I'm worried about said goals being too ambitious and the amount of work required to meet them being overly daunting. Still, I guess it's not a unique issue, and I suspect this perfectionism is why (as some others commenting here mention) many successful entrepreneurs are the kind who can step back, stop trying to be 'artistic' and just get the damn thing done, tech be damned. Heck, sometimes I suspect someone like Homer Simpson/Peter Griffin would probably be the ideal entrepreneur/founder, since while they're not particularly bright, they've also got no inner filter whatsoever, are completely delusional about how good their work is and are willing to jump into new projects and ideas without a second thought. I'd rather be a delusional moron who gets things done than a normal person haunted by inner doubt and constantly worried about whether their work is good enough. Either way, hopefully I'll just bite the bullet and get my current projects in the next year or so. Better to have something rather than nothing.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  I'd be happy to look over your project and its features to let you know if something should be a v2 feature. Kick you to the finish line so to speak and keep you accountable. In fact, this would make for a nice community. Anyone try to set one up like this?
  - davidjnelson 8y ago
    Cool idea. Kind of like the boss as a service idea, but with peers.
- 8y ago
bitL 8y ago
Hire a boss ;-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18512197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18512197
superasn 8y ago
I have a very different take on why you're struggling. I read this in some book a long time ago when I too was struggling with a similar problem of procrastination and this advice helped me a lot (but YMMV). What it says is (in my own words) you have three people living in you called the id, ego and the superego. The id or the kid is the child who wants to play, be happy all the time and wanta instant gratification, while the exact opposite is your superego that wants to impress others and wants to be perfect. The ego is the middleman trying to settle the two. So anyway long story short your superego or the perfectionist is what is making you obsess over the technology and you're doing the same work over and over again (if I'm correct you've rewritten it 4 times?) yet your id is not getting any reward and just more and more mundane work, so it revolts and creates resistance and starts giving you the excuses for not doing it anymore or calling the whole thing lame. The best approach as others have pointed out is because you're being a perfectionist. As soon as you can stop doing that you will suddenly see that work even though mundane is getting done. Also you may need some play too as you've said you're feeling like a failure (search play it away), that book may have some invaluable advice for you on how to get back in the game.
buboard 8y ago
Calling procrastination resistance is a bit rich. And wasting time writing a blog post about it ... kind of nullifies the blog post itself.
jcroll 8y ago
Looks more like you're procrastinating writing blog posts
mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
I too have a side project that is nearing completion but I'm nervous to launch it. It's nerve-racking not knowing if and when someone might sign up. As a a non-dev it's even harder since I had to pay a developer out of pocket. I'd this doesn't work I'm out of a lot of my personal money.
- jlangenauer 8y ago
  If you don't launch, I can predict with 100% confidence how many people will sign up: 0. What do you have to lose at this point? The money's already spent.
danielor 8y ago
I think this is natural. The line between a hobby project, and unpaid venture can be quite thin. When your attention is split, it only becomes harder. Most rational people want to live life a little, and not work constantly.
StavrosK 8y ago
I can't relate to this at all, I work on a side-project for a week or so and then launch it. Here's last week's, a community of maintainers that aims to maintain abandoned FOSS projects: https://www.codeshelter.co/ https://www.codeshelter.co/ Why rewrite stuff? Just see if people want what you're building first and then figure out whether it's well-written or needs a rewrite.
Delmania 8y ago
These questions are telling: * No one will actually use this. * Will designers really find this useful? * What if you launch and no one finds it valuable? Why not do some basic user research and get people to pay for it? This isn't some new ground, there are literally hundreds of internet gurus all saying that if you whip up a prototype, present it to people, and they pay for it, you'll have a higher chance of success.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  Do you have experience with this? What if your prototype doesn't have any of the important functionality?
  - Delmania 8y ago
    Then you analyze feedback and redo your prototype with what your customers need? The key thing is understand the underlying desire. Ford is famous for saying that if he asked people, they would tell him they wanted a faster horse. He understood they wanted a quicker means of transportation, so he built a car. That's what you do with the feedback of the prototype. Listen to responses, and adjust or abandon. As for experience? Not directly, but seriously, this isn't hard. This is literally the standard way every successful businesses operate. They analyze market demand, built an answer, get feedback, and adjust. Only very rarely does an individual's personal itch ever become a successful product.
milesvp 8y ago
It's a shame no one is really talking about the elephant in the room. At the end of the day, most people are working on side projects... at the end of the day. If you really want to be effective working on something that isn't your primary thing, it absolutely can't be after a full days work, even if that work isn't very taxing. Your mind needs time to not be working, or at least, not be working on things similar to your day job. Worse, is many people working on side projects are also doing it at the expense of sleep, which is kind of like doubling down on a losing bet. Sure you might get lucky, but you've still got a negative expected value from your time. People get dumb when they're tired, and worse, is they often can't even tell how dumb they've gotten. If you want to work on a side project, you probably don't want to work on it after work. And you probably don't want to work on it on your first of consecutive days off. Even writers who claim to be night owls tend to work on their writing first thing after a good sleep. Also, if you really want to validate this wisdom, I suggest learning to play a competitive game with a ranking system (although you may never get around to your side project if you do...). I would bet dollars to donuts to that you will tend to gain ELO/rating early in the day, and you will tend to lose ELO/rating late in the day. That has held true for me for any game I play seriously. It can be even worse at night, in that as you lose game after game, you start to go on tilt, and try to keep playing until you get that win, or until you gain back the rating you started with. It's absolutely insane, but often not obviously insane until the next morning. Also, probably just take my word on it, and don't game competitively, you're life will be richer without it. Just understand that there is a mountain of evidence that talks about how bad people are at performing when tired, and that the very best artists tend to spend most of their time recovering from their creative endeavors, punctuated by very short, very intense periods of exceedingly high focus.
- brbrodude 8y ago
  A good hack to this is to wake up earlier and work on your stuff first thing in the morning, allows you to spend that first energy on your real goals, and then you can move to other stuff. It's fucking hard for me to wake early, but I really need to get back to doing this. Edit: another advantage of this method is that you can have guilt-free relaxation on the end of the day.
ErikAugust 8y ago
This is relatable. I have even begun to read "War of Art". Consistency is key to momentum. My most recent project won an overall award at ETHDenver - which at the time became the world's largest cryptocurrency hackathon. My teammate and I created a cyberpunk-themed cryptocurrency trading game based on the classic Drugwars. My teammate is a great multimedia/graphic artist, and it was very well received. If interested, Beta is at https://www.cachethegame.com https://www.cachethegame.com. However, I would about 20% of the current total project (it's been 9 months) was completed in the 36 hours of the hackathon. We were on a roll. After the hackathon - we ended up talking to investors, but decided to pass. This is a double-edged sword with downside. "Side" projects are hard in the way self-guided learning is hard. You don't have people breathing down your neck periodically to keep you on track. The further we got along to releasing a Beta the more the "Resistance" crept in. To the point of, as soon as the Beta was released - basically taking several weeks off altogether. This is where some seed investment would have helped, besides the obvious ability to clear the calendar a bit. Forget big splashes of "raising a ton of money" or an ICO - it's practical to raise a bit money for reasons I mentioned.
ernsheong 8y ago
As a perfectionist myself, I continue to learn that you have to live with some "shit" in order to get your stuff out there. There's the tendency to rewrite/refactor, this makes side projects harder than it needs to be. It's self-defeating, really. There's plenty of time if you succeed, but no time if you don't. The perfectionism also prevents shipping because you want to avoid the impending negative feedback of your current project, and so you bounce off to something else. How to overcome? Experience (and failures) helps. You've spent so much perfection on something and it still didn't succeed the way you hoped. The next time you would care less about perfection and just ship.
viburnum 8y ago
It gets hard at the 90% point because that's when you realize your idea was bad, and nothing you can do at the last 10% will fix that.
magic_beans 8y ago
Note: this applies to finishing a novel manuscript as well. Source: self.
peterburkimsher 8y ago
Good luck. If you use your side project, it's worth it. If you learned new skills, the project taught you better than any textbook. Marketing is hard. If you ask people what they want, they don't know what they didn't imagine. (Insert quote by Henry Ford about a faster horse, or the St Pancras train station champagne bar, etc). It's better to build something first, and if people like it, continue developing it. I've made several Show HN, and occasionally even been offered jobs that way. I need a job now, and I've tried some more projects with that purpose, sadly without success. I think it shows motivation and initiative far better than a résumé, though, and attracts like-minded new friends.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  Landing a job you deem [almost] perfect for you is, as many other things, a matter of luck beyond many other factors. Very uncomfortable truth and something I had to gradually accept over being unemployed for 6 months (in fairness, I had enough money reserves to live very comfortably for 4 of them). I am not gonna bore you with my story but the bottom line is -- keep trying. As you said, marketing is hard. But very, VERY essential, including in how do you present yourself in interviews. In the end what landed me the job was an injection of optimism I got from a really good massage by my wife and then 8 hours of tight sleep -- I used that optimism to send out several more job applications to leads I deemed highly unlikely to even get a response from. And lo and behold, 3 days later I successfully moved through all phases of the interview process of one of the companies, and I am starting in several days. Don't let a bad period get to your head, no matter how long it may be. Persistence is basically your #1 advantage. Good luck to you!
austincheney 8y ago
My year long application update is finally nearing publication. The emotion and fear are very real. The psychosis resembles combat fatigue. It’s exhausting to think about, but I know people have waited on this and depend on my delivery.
burtonator 8y ago
This is my side project at the moment: https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ .. but it's sort of become full time. For me it started off as a need to manage my reading as I was working on another project around cryptocurrencies and reading tons of PDFs and web content. Got majorly side tracked but launched it and so far there are a few thousand active users.
- SquishyPanda23 8y ago
  Thanks, this looks super cool.
- fvargas 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing, this looks neat and useful! The pagemarks are an interesting concept. It would be cool if the top progress bar above the document showed, not cumulative progress, but the progress as it maps to the areas marked on the document, which aren't necessarily contiguous. Kinda like the progress bar you have for a torrent as non-contiguous chunks are downloaded. This provides spatial information about what parts of the document have been read.
happybuy 8y ago
I've found that if I can't just complete a certain feature, task or function on my product, and it keeps dragging on, then there is likely a reason for it being too difficult (more than just laziness on my part!) A good approach when this happens is to redefine the feature. Either by reconsidering its importance, investigating different ways to achieve a similar outcome or mostly decomposing the feature into even simpler and more minimal deliverables and implementations. Then deliver the extremely minimal implementation. In a lot of cases you then come back and make it more rounded later on, or in many cases, the simpler deliverable is actually all that is required and you move onto something else entirely. It's taking a disciplined and strict MVP approach to every task you have and focusing more on continual delivery as a north star. This tends to work because – as noted by the author – giving up on a side project is the biggest risk and one of the larger reasons for failure (you can't succeed if you don't show up). By always delivering something/anything you get the satisfaction and reward of progress which is a lot of times all that is needed to keep going.
mooreds 8y ago
I've run a side project for about 8 years ( https://farmshares.info https://farmshares.info ) with varying levels of effort and commitment (and income). I think it's key to realize: * you have to be really into solving the problem * you probably aren't going to make much money from it * a side project is a great way to experiment with different tech
ngrilly 8y ago
Why the rewrite from React to vanilla JS?
akavel 8y ago
Related Ask HN from a few months ago: "Why is nearing completion so demotivating?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17138794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17138794
finfun234 8y ago
Hi Dave, Kudos for sharing what you experienced. I actually completed a year working on https://shareseer.com https://shareseer.com on thanksgiving day. It is a side project. I have found shipping whenever a small milestone is hit to work for me. Another trick i use is to keep a backlog of items that need to be done, which brings me back to work on it. Thirdly I really care about the problem. Fourth an d finally I realized distribution is a vastly harder problem than product. Getting people to use what you build is the core of whether the product succeeds or not.
systematical 8y ago
12 years ago I could code on a side project 8 hours straight. It was fun and exciting. 6 years ago I could do that, but with less frequency. Today its a rare thing that I can even sit down and get in 4 hours in. My computer is littered with barely started projects and a few projects sitting around 50%-90% completed. The last side project I was able to hammer out was a thin API wrapper that I open sourced to github. It only took about 4 hours to code. It's a piece of a bigger project I am working on. Maybe thats a possible solution? Breaking your bigger project into smaller chunks?
- craftyguy 8y ago
  > Maybe thats a possible solution? Breaking your bigger project into smaller chunks? Definitely. Anything I cannot hammer out in a weekend I break into smaller chunks and treat each one as a separate project even though they are all contributing towards one larger one. This advice generally works great for any large type of problem or endeavour.
vonnik 8y ago
> "GET's"
ronreiter 8y ago
Great post! Added my two cents: https://medium.com/@ronreiter/why-side-projects-are-hard-psychologically-speaking-1672331ead79 https://medium.com/@ronreiter/why-side-projects-are-hard-psy...
thesz 8y ago
Obligatory reference to За миллиард лет до конца света: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitely_Maybe_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitely_Maybe_(novel) My friend developed first then Soviet software-controlled modem. He said they experienced more line cut-offs (hangups by telephone line operator) during testing next to the end of project (which was a success). He explained that their modem had crude analog adapter and caused a lot of noise and/or interference with the other phone company machinery. He said he also suspected KGB who they may thought that this is new voice scrambling device. Basically, the Resistance is real, but can be explained by some real factors, just like in the novel above.

489 points by startlaunch 8y ago

I have launched several side projects a couple of them financially successful. They have had plenty of bugs in them and I got several angry emails about various things, but over the time I have fixed them as they come in. It's a great way of prioritizing what of that last 20% you should fix. In other words. Ship as fast as possible, treat it as a project then over time improve. If you have something of value people will use it even when it's not optimal.

ravenstine 8y ago

I've found that the heart of the problem is... money. With money comes time. If funds are sufficient, most of those whispers are diminished. Let's say one is sitting on a pile of money: > A year! Why haven’t you shipped yet? I would not be bothered by this if I could continue to fund the project. > This is boring. Just shelve this project and move on to something fun & exciting. With money could come the possibility of hiring someone to do the boring stuff, or making the project look professional enough that it attracts contributors who think it has a future. > This niche isn’t big enough. You should change the target to developers? Marketers? Sales? If the project has enough money, course correction should be much less of a risk. > No one will actually use this. / Will designers really find this useful? / What if you launch and no one finds it valuable? Ok, this would be a worry no matter how much money one has. Although I suppose it's less of a risk if a project is small. I recently set out to work on a side project with virtually no funding. I wouldn't call it a mistake as I've learned a lot about myself and the nature of doing a side project full-time, but money is a biggie no matter how much motivation one can muster. Maybe if I had spent less money on fancy lunches when I worked for a company, for example, I could have bought a lot more time to finish what I was working on. Now I'm at a point where I have to focus almost all my time on finding employment because the electricity doesn't pay itself. Next time, I've gotta learn how to raise money for what I do instead of believing I can self-fund it. lol

segmondy 8y ago
It's not about money, it's about time, flow & motivation. Time is the biggest obstacle, side project implies that there's another full time job. With a full time job and other obligations such as family or volunteer activities. Without enough long stretch of time, it's difficult to get into a flow state. Without enough flow while working on any project motivation wanes. The secret becomes figuring out how to manage your small chunk of time, how to get into flow fast, suspend it and resume it across time and how to keep the motivation up if you miss out on flow.
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  No, in the end it's pretty much all about the money. And not just funding, but about making money. I mean imagine that you did finish your side project and did ship it, now what? Does it become sustainable the moment you ship it, does it pay your bills, does it maintain itself, pay for its own infrastructure? Of course not. You still need to make money just to keep it and yourself alive, and quite a bit of money.
  - segmondy 8y ago
    end goal for all side projects is not money, end goal sometimes is scratching your own itch and using it, conquering a challenge you encountered, learning whatever you set out to do, etc. I have built 100+ side projects, most of them have NOTHING to do with money. People write poems, stories, music, paint, build all sorts of things for the fun of it, and guess what? many of us code for the joy of it too. Keeping a side project going is pretty much $0-$5/month. if you already have a VPS, you can just run it on there, or you can run it at your own server or on a raspberry pi, you can even run it on many cloud servers for free. Using serverless for instance, you can run many side project on AWS for free.
Lordarminius 8y ago
Could not agree more.
akvadrako 8y ago

alwaysreading 8y ago

Steven Pressfield’s War of Art (mentioned in the post) is such a great read when you’re stuck - https://amzn.to/2FF9Nts https://amzn.to/2FF9Nts

toyg 8y ago
Is it? Not according to this review: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/1936891026/R1PIVDBK0NS9D3/ref=cm_cr_dp_mb_rvw_6?ie=UTF8&cursor=6 https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/1936891026/R1PIVDBK0NS9D... When God entered the picture, I lost all interest.
- tlb 8y ago
  The book invokes the pagan notion of a pantheon of gods, rather than the Judeo-Christian God. He describes a ritual where he propitiates the Muses (the gods of creativity) before sitting down to write. You might find it easier to swallow, because when people invoke the J-C God they often mean it completely literally, while the Muses are clearly allegorical. But to get through the book, you have to suspend your rational empiricism quite a few times. Perhaps no more than to read The Odyssey or Macbeth, where internal human struggles are illustrated with supernatural imagery.
  - atentaten 8y ago
    This. The Muses and Resistance are simply tools to help grasp and externalize the conflicting forces within you.
  - jen729w 8y ago
    Not true. A quick search of my Kindle version shows references to “God” – the one we all think of as God – twice on p34 then on p86, p109, and so on. The author believes in God and isn’t afraid of letting you know about it.
- mattnewport 8y ago
  Many of the greatest human achievements in both art and science have had explicitly religious motivations. I'm an atheist myself but it seems like it might be worth exploring / understanding that if one wants to achieve something great. I've no idea if this book is helpful for that - I've never read it though I have seen it recommended several times - but it seems like an interesting topic to explore regardless of one's personal religious beliefs. Despite my own lack of belief, to my taste religiously inspired art and architecture of the past seems to reach a level of greatness that seems missing from much of the modern God-free stuff.

simonw 8y ago

The absolute best advice on side projects (and full startups) I know of is that classic quote attributed to Reid Hoffman: "If You're Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late" These days I even apply it to my blog entries. No one else cares about those details you are obsessing over. What matters is that your product lets people do something that they couldn't do before - or in the case of blog entries that it teaches them something they didn't know already.

freedomben 8y ago
I agree mostly with this, but I would emphasize that your first release must be usable. I've seen a few promising products get released too early by people pushing to "ship early, ship often," etc, only to crash and burn because they quickly developed a reputation for being buggy pieces of crap. Once you have a slate of bad reviews on an app store, it's difficult to fix.
- TravHatesMe 8y ago
  I agree. If users have a poor experience, they'll be less likely to try it again after you've polished it. I'm sure there's a balance between the two, but "if you're not embarrassed" is too strong of a statement (I suppose it's an exaggeration to send a message). Plus, embarrassment is subjective.
- happybuy 8y ago
  > Once you have a slate of bad reviews on an app store, it's difficult to fix. Not really. Take note of what the bad reviews say, fix the issues, release a new version and repeat. Once you've got to the point that you've resolved the majority of the problems noted, release a version in the App Store which resets all your ratings. If you keep going - from that point on - you should be getting better reviews and ratings which will make it a more popular app and these later reviews will eventually overwhelm the earlier lower ratings. Also once the app is actually objectively good, use SKStoreReviewController.requestReview to prompt for reviews from users to encourage more and more good ratings. It could be said that a poorly rated app is simply one which hasn't listened to feedback and focused on constant improvements.

brbrodude 8y ago

I'm three years in.

napsterbr 8y ago
Four here. Cheers!
- HDevo 8y ago
  Hello, eight here. Good luck!

Kaveren 8y ago

> "Re-written the code base 4 times (Laravel, Vanilla JS, React, then back to Vanilla JS)." The path of least resistance is to research all available options, pick one, and see the project through, not to jump back and forth. It's a side project, but still, this isn't going to make it any easier. That aside, the side project looks like it could see a good degree of success. I wouldn't use it because it seems like it's way too simple a feature to outsource, but then again, many companies also pay for simple customer / customer-service instant messaging services.

dukoid 8y ago
Simpler said than done: Researching something in the abstract might lead to different results than actually using it...
pdimitar 8y ago
I fully agree with the premise but many times, it's just way too hard to actually predict the production problems you will have even with your most favourite tech. Truth is that while working in a corp you can't see the big picture of seeing a project through from start to finish. For example, I am helping on mostly good faith -- and at about 30% of what I'd normally charge -- a friend to bootstrap their website / platform and even though I use language and tech I very much like and I am the dictator of the backend, 95% of the work is extremely boring and it's just "make this controller, make this API endpoint, wire this object to that other object, integrate this payment provider" etc... Combine with the universally bad deployment experience of basically 99% of the languages out there and things aren't really that glorious even if the tech is much better than what you worked with your entire life beforehand. What I am saying is -- even for every experienced programmers it's very hard to make an accurate prediction. But if there's one metric I always use, it's this one: "does the tech stand in my way to productivity and waste my time with details I shouldn't care about?" -- if so, I try to ditch it (not possible with JS but still, there are transpiled languages and frameworks that make things better).

barefootford 8y ago

I've found that setting a very hard deadline, ideally with some money on the line, is the best way to guarantee something gets done. It seems like this should be the authors next step. To get my last video out, I sent a friend $200 through Square Cash and said "Only send this back to me if I have X published by X hour on X date". It worked! I definitely feel resistance in the last stages of side projects, but I don't necessarily buy Pressfields reasons for why it's there. Still valuable to know it will be there ahead of time though, regardless of what its origins are.

ungzd 8y ago

Side projects are hard when you are using "best practices" from Google and Facebook, choosing the best and "most right" js framework, even landing page looks like landing page of "best unicorn VC companies".

robterrell 8y ago
For me, it's easy to complicate things by saying "for this side project I'm going to learn new thing X" -- using 'learning something new' to help justify the time spent, but usually screwing up the project as a result.
- amoitnga 8y ago
  So true. I've done it, I know it. It's very dangerous.

soneca 8y ago

My inconsequential guess is that he only not launched it yet because (i) he thinks the technology he uses matters more than the product and (ii) he is building features that should not be included in the first version. I was able to launch my side-project (the for-profit bootstrapping biz type), a web app, in 7 months even being a junior frontend developer. I chose the tech with the sole criteria of how easy it would be for me to build it (I went with Ember, that I use on my day-job, and Rails). And the whole time I was constantly thinking hard about a feature and then realizing "I don't need that for now...". I then would write the feature idea in a card on my backlog (a Github's project board) and move on to the next important feature. What I guess is making so hard for him is not the diligence, commitment or motivation, but the product decisions he has to make (and I speculate he is making the wrong ones).

swsieber 8y ago

I'm about halfway to launching a side project (I seem to be close than 50%, but there's always the 90-10 rule). It's been fun. I've been writing the backend in rust, using squire for storage, and actix-web for the server framework. The front end is plain html without a lick of js. And my css is really just compiled scss. I'm happy to report I've only engaged in a small bit of yak-shaving (writing a custom derive for defining APIs I need to hi from my backend for integration purposes) and only a small bit of framework churn (I switched web server frameworks because I wanted an abstraction that wasn't ergonomic/available in the initial one i had chosen). And it's been fun. The best part is that even if it flops, my wife and I will still use it. Edit: I've only been at it for a couple months

echelon 8y ago
What are you working on? I'm interested in Rust projects, especially web ones.
- swsieber 8y ago
  Integrating SMS (Twilio/Plivo) with Google Spreadsheets for Budgeting purposes. Basically allows people with custom budgets to get an easier form of transaction recording. I had been using warp, but I wanted to write a custom middleware for some session / cookie management, but ran into trouble, so I moved to actix-web. The google api crates also didn't seem to compile/work right for me, so that's why I wrote a custom derive. Basically, it allows you to define a struct that represents an endpoint, and you can just mark what get's included in the query, body, or in the url with some nice interpolation. And then I defined a endpoint processor that can take that and execute it, deserializing it. I implemented that for the reqwest client and for one of my custom structs, a google api token. Here's an example of what a marked up struct looks like: https://gist.github.com/samsieber/d2efec774320c0af01ee72cb0958c9a3 https://gist.github.com/samsieber/d2efec774320c0af01ee72cb09... . It's a little rough around the edges, but I think by the time I'm done it'll have acquired enough polish to release it on crates.io - it's been super useful to eliminate a lot of the fiddliness I had been doing with making requests.
albertgoeswoof 8y ago

catchmeifyoucan 8y ago

Usually, after I build everything out, I debate whether I want to publish my work or not. I find that to be very hard. What motivates me is at least sending it out to my friends and getting validation that this is good and I should share it. So that pushes me to do the extra mile for polish.

heipei 8y ago

At this point in my life I've started to believe that whenever you talk to someone who is "passionate about technology X and clean architectures" or "wants to work on challenging technical problems" is ultimately doomed to fail when setting out to create a (for-profit, bootstrapped) business. This is a strong opinion and there is certainly a spectrum for this mindset, but at the most extreme your mindset should be more along the lines of "all technology ultimately sucks, let's figure out the most straightforward way and the least amount of effort and headaches so we can create value for our customers so they, and we, can get off that damn computer screen and enjoy the fruits of our labor". If you're saying "I'm passionate about delivering great products to users" or even "I'm passionate about making money" (I respect that) then technology becomes the tool you unfortunately have to wield to arrive at that goal. Note that this attitude only applies to people who want to take ownership and deliver a fully functional product. There's tons of great people who are in it for the sheer enjoyment of working with technology, they all will have a great time working on challenging problems at one of the many tech companies. And there's a few people who can both enjoy technical challenges but also switch to dumb and boring crunch mode when it's demanded by the task at hand.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
Passionate about outcomes, not the means. The only thing is by not giving a smack about the tech is that you risk looking like one of those 'impostors' by the nerd-crew who think everything is about the tech. Also ... there are intangible benefits from our hard-core nerd outs. Let's be real: 1/2 of the tech we used may not have been invented if it were not for some dude doing it 'just cause'.
- wolco 8y ago
  It depends on your customer. If you happen to sell api services make sure the public face is at an acceptable level. In the backend make it work. Later make it perfect, scalable, etc when new features demand it.
- monsieurbanana 8y ago
  Half is a very, very conservative estimate. Hell, Linux was made 'just cause'.

yjhoney 8y ago

I know I'm nitpicking here, but I find it annoying when people say things like: "If you’ve yet to read these x books, do yourself a favor and buy them today". Did myself a "favor" a few times in the past and every single time I only read the first couple of pages and ended up giving them away. Or worse, I get FOMO so I keep those books around and it becomes clutter around my small apartment. Its hard to focus and read the rest of what the author has to say if he makes blanket statements like that.

toyg 8y ago
Worse, the mentioned books are some veiled Christian propaganda, as mentioned in this review: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/1936891026/R1PIVDBK0NS9D3/ref=cm_cr_dp_mb_rvw_6?ie=UTF8&cursor=6 https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/1936891026/R1PIVDBK0NS9D...
user68858788 8y ago
Don't forget the affiliate link! It is annoying and, IMO, reduces the credibility of the author by quite a bit.
james_s_tayler 8y ago
Qualify your advisors. It's not a wholly terrible strategy to use peoples recommendations but it usually serves me fairly well to only take recommendations by people I hold in high regard.

egfx 8y ago

The trick is finding a problem you have a passion for. That way, no matter what or how long, it won't feel like work. Your side project is the sabbatical.

dukoid 8y ago
The passionate part is the proof of concept. After that, you can decide between persistence and passion for the next project... :) I think keeping the scope as small and simple as possible might be even more important than passion.
coldtea 8y ago
The problem is that whatever the problem you're trying to solve, the parts you have a passion for are only small parts of the overall solution. It's the rest that gets you (e.g. you might like coding the backend algorithms but hate UI work). And even if you love all parts, you'll probably still hate the minutiae that goes into a finished product.
rpeden 8y ago
The downside to this approach is that it can kill the passion for the thing you were passionate about. Also, I've noticed that real world solutions to problems tend to include lots of schleps that are excruciatingly boring, but necessary. The longer I do this kind of work, the more strongly I believe that the people who are most likely to see a project through to completion are the ones who have the stone cold professionalism - or just plain stubbornness - to grind though the boring stuff instead of just faffing around on the bits of the problem that they're passionate about. I think a side project that's just about indulging a passion is totally fine. But a side project that is also a product that makes money will almost require lots of pieces that definitely feel like work.

pmontra 8y ago

A note to the author: this is by far the whitest font I saw on so many light gray text on white background sites. Why? It's beyond readability.

Ace17 8y ago
Yeah, it's unreadable. Too bad, the article seemed interesting.

jammygit 8y ago

The real reason they're hard is the employment contracts that forbid them (or surrender their ownership, which is almost worse)

wmurmann 8y ago
Just because you sign a contract doesn’t mean it’s enforceable.
- albertgoeswoof 8y ago
  Bingo- has there actually been a recorded case of this happening to someone who’s working on an unrelated project? Obviously if you copy your employers product or do something very similar it’s suspect, but if you work for a defense contractor and build a social network for cats in your spare time, they’re not going to care
  - jammygit 8y ago
    Are there recorded cases of this happening where the employee won? I've heard of those 'used a company laptop to work on the project so the employer is out for you' cases, but never read much in detail.
- jammygit 8y ago
  I don't know how to even begin figuring out whether something is enforceable or not. I read a news article that Canada isn't that protective of employees in this sense, but forget the details.
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  I was discussing this with a lawyer yesterday and she had something interesting to say about that. At least in my jurisdiction both parties must act in good faith. This includes knowingly signing an invalid contract and blowing off some obligations in it on the premise that you didn't have to comply any way because it wasn't valid in the first place. In such cases it can be construed that you did act in good faith and a judgement made against you.

Dowwie 8y ago

Purpose pushes us forward. Find yours.

csytan 8y ago

Reading this blog post, I see two skills in conflict: 1. Ship now, ship often 2. Strive for perfection The first one is required for entrepreneurs. Your "work <--> reward" iteration cycle should be as short as possible, and should end with the customer handing you money. The second one is a skill that rewards knowledge acquisition, and can be especially helpful for those looking to improve their skillset in order to move up the career ladder. It's also an iteration cycle, but the reward often doesn't end with directly delivering value to a customer. Lastly, I think that startup media (Tech Crunch, YC, etc) has a lot to do with this. There are way fewer stories told about bootstrapping something long term, compared to stories about successful startups hitting home runs. The reality is that the bulk of the work will be after you launch, and will likely require continuing effort in the form of years rather than months.

strig 8y ago
Maybe it could be rewritten as: 1. Ship now 2. Ship often, and strive for (eventual) perfection
enraged_camel 8y ago
IME, the core of your product, the part that your customers use regularly, should work perfectly. It’s okay for the other stuff to not be perfect.
- Swizec 8y ago
  On the other hand: if nobody is buying your product, it doesn't matter how perfectly it works.
  - enraged_camel 8y ago
    There is some truth to that, but most people want to try out a product before they buy it. So if they run into bugs during that trial period, then your conversion rate will suffer.
opportune 8y ago
Honestly I think ship now ship often deserves an asterisk by it. When you’re designing large and intricate back ends for a system that needs it, and you’re a PM who only sees things in terms of end-user features, it’s easy to set yourself up for failure trying to ship so fast that you accumulate technical debt faster than you can ever pay it down (because you underengineer the underlying platform but need to support it forever to meet SLA, and good luck arguing for a complete rewrite) That is, no mantra above a certain level of abstraction should be adhered to too strictly. Sometimes it’s better to ship 3 months later if it means 3 years of way simpler support and scaling

madeuptempacct 8y ago

I am amused by how easy I find it to work on corporate drone work 8-12 hours a day + during my vacation, but have a hard time forcing myself to work even a couple of hours on my own stuff. I think it's because in the end, it's hard to really believe it's not all for nothing.

faitswulff 8y ago
> I think it's because in the end, it's hard to really believe it's not all for nothing. For myself, at least, I feel that drone work is obviously for naught, which makes side project failures that much more demoralizing.
ryanwaggoner 8y ago
I’m literally laughing out loud. I thought I recognized your username: you were one of the ones calling Boss as a Service a complete scam for losers who have psychological issues motivating themselves. And yet here you are, talking about how it’s easy to work on boring corporate stuff where you have a boss, but it’s nearly impossible to motivate yourself on your own stuff. Which is exactly the issue that something like Boss as a Service is there to solve. It’s so perfect that I’m pretty convinced this is a subtle troll on your part.
- madeuptempacct 8y ago
  Hmm, saw this just before heading out. It's not a troll. It has nothing to do with having a boss, it has to do with knowing you are getting a guaranteed paycheck and knowing you need that to survive or maintain a certain lifestyle.
  - wst_ 8y ago
    Not OP and I think too it's not about the boss. But marketing and sales as a service could be a help. I guess this is at least a part of the job that investors are doing for the startups. Maybe not marketing and sales but guidance to get a ROI.
- draw_down 8y ago

encoderer 8y ago

Really, you probably don’t want to hear this, but you need to ship. You have probably overbuilt already. The reason I’ve basically embraced a lifestyle with a “second job” is that it’s enormously rewarding both intellectually and financially. Over 4 years the business has grown from a “hobby that made me a few bucks” to meaningfully changing my families financial outlook. There is no way I could have sustained the investment without those two sources of reward.

miguelmota 8y ago

My philosophy has always been "make it run, make it right, make it fast". If it runs and is functional it's good enough to ship and release. Making the codebase pretty and optimizations come afterwards

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pascalxus 8y ago

IMHO tech is the easy part. The two hardest parts of side projects are: 1. Finding a solvable problem that hasn't already been done a million times. 2. Getting users and breaking even on user acquisition costs. If you're re-writing your project 4 times, it means you're having fun or learning(nothing wrong with that). But for those that are building a business, it is about delivering value to end customers.

ryanwaggoner 8y ago
IMHO, only half of number one is a problem, because something that’s been done a million times has proven repeatedly that there’s a market there. It might be too competitive, but it might be easier to find a profitable niche than you’d think.
- buboard 8y ago
  it may mean that there are users , but no money to make
buboard 8y ago
> breaking even on user acquisition cost this has become increasingly hard as we are short of options for monetization,as startups focus on being acquired since many years ago > it means you're having fun or learning I guess developers look at the huge salaries and decide that a job with the latest qualifications is a more profitable investment of their time in the medium term.
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
  this has become increasingly hard I take it you weren't around back when the only realistic method of finding customers was magazine advertising and a 1.5"x2" ad in a tech magazine was $500/month with no guarantee that anyone would even notice it? look at the huge salaries For a lot of us it's not about the money; it's about being to live by your own rules.
preommr 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

blizkreeg 8y ago

Don’t mean to be mean (i’ve been there) but this is the money line “Re-written the code base 4 times (Laravel, Vanilla JS, React, then back to Vanilla JS).” Is the goal to ship or play? If latter, no harm done, else that’s your resistance, nothing else.

sdenton4 8y ago

My breakthrough this year has been working on a side project that really really isn't just me. It's a collaboration with a small research group at a university. I do my stuff mainly outside of work, and generally am improving the group's overall research bandwidth, rather than taking a full project on all by myself. Having some social obligation to keep the relationship going is enough to overcome a lot of the little hurdles, and having some excited feedback when I make some genuine progress is super helpful. It's also been a great chance to just meet lots of lovely people in the community, and having the communication has helped me make progress much faster than I would have on my own. And best of all, I get to have the feeling of doing some real Science, in an important but generally underfunded problem space. It's been great.

pdimitar 8y ago
Would you be comfortable to share what you are working on? I'd love to be a part of something like that... but definitely don't have the network for it.
- sdenton4 8y ago
  I spent about a year or so reading and reimplementing interesting papers around machine learning on audio - probably six months was actually getting to know signal processing in a real way and learning tensorflow, and then some months doing seq2seq for ASR slightly more seriously. And now I've been doing things that you can find in the lifeclef or dcase competitions, with a group that focuses on one of the sub tasks.

vexangel 8y ago

Just started a side project and hit all of these ideas. For me they just aren't pronounced enough to be stopping points at this early stage. Hope this helps!

CM30 8y ago

So true, I'm constantly plagued by those thoughts to stop whenever I work on anything, in case it's either not good enough for the public, boring, not gonna sell/find users, etc, and every minute I spend working on my projects is a battle between declaring I'll actually finish them this time around and a feeling of 'relax, you can take more time here'. That said, they're not the only issues. In fact, I'd say what hurts me more than the nagging thoughts in the article is a deadly combination of OCD esque perfectionism and a tendency towards feature/scope creep that really needs a good project managing laying down limits. This means endless reams of time is spent on 'nice to have' features that keep wasting more and more time, like a one person version of Duke Nukem Forever. And then even more time is spent procrastinating because I'm worried about said goals being too ambitious and the amount of work required to meet them being overly daunting. Still, I guess it's not a unique issue, and I suspect this perfectionism is why (as some others commenting here mention) many successful entrepreneurs are the kind who can step back, stop trying to be 'artistic' and just get the damn thing done, tech be damned. Heck, sometimes I suspect someone like Homer Simpson/Peter Griffin would probably be the ideal entrepreneur/founder, since while they're not particularly bright, they've also got no inner filter whatsoever, are completely delusional about how good their work is and are willing to jump into new projects and ideas without a second thought. I'd rather be a delusional moron who gets things done than a normal person haunted by inner doubt and constantly worried about whether their work is good enough. Either way, hopefully I'll just bite the bullet and get my current projects in the next year or so. Better to have something rather than nothing.

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
I'd be happy to look over your project and its features to let you know if something should be a v2 feature. Kick you to the finish line so to speak and keep you accountable. In fact, this would make for a nice community. Anyone try to set one up like this?
- davidjnelson 8y ago
  Cool idea. Kind of like the boss as a service idea, but with peers.
8y ago

bitL 8y ago

Hire a boss ;-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18512197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18512197

superasn 8y ago

I have a very different take on why you're struggling. I read this in some book a long time ago when I too was struggling with a similar problem of procrastination and this advice helped me a lot (but YMMV). What it says is (in my own words) you have three people living in you called the id, ego and the superego. The id or the kid is the child who wants to play, be happy all the time and wanta instant gratification, while the exact opposite is your superego that wants to impress others and wants to be perfect. The ego is the middleman trying to settle the two. So anyway long story short your superego or the perfectionist is what is making you obsess over the technology and you're doing the same work over and over again (if I'm correct you've rewritten it 4 times?) yet your id is not getting any reward and just more and more mundane work, so it revolts and creates resistance and starts giving you the excuses for not doing it anymore or calling the whole thing lame. The best approach as others have pointed out is because you're being a perfectionist. As soon as you can stop doing that you will suddenly see that work even though mundane is getting done. Also you may need some play too as you've said you're feeling like a failure (search play it away), that book may have some invaluable advice for you on how to get back in the game.

buboard 8y ago

Calling procrastination resistance is a bit rich. And wasting time writing a blog post about it ... kind of nullifies the blog post itself.

jcroll 8y ago

Looks more like you're procrastinating writing blog posts

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago

I too have a side project that is nearing completion but I'm nervous to launch it. It's nerve-racking not knowing if and when someone might sign up. As a a non-dev it's even harder since I had to pay a developer out of pocket. I'd this doesn't work I'm out of a lot of my personal money.

jlangenauer 8y ago
If you don't launch, I can predict with 100% confidence how many people will sign up: 0. What do you have to lose at this point? The money's already spent.

danielor 8y ago

I think this is natural. The line between a hobby project, and unpaid venture can be quite thin. When your attention is split, it only becomes harder. Most rational people want to live life a little, and not work constantly.

StavrosK 8y ago

I can't relate to this at all, I work on a side-project for a week or so and then launch it. Here's last week's, a community of maintainers that aims to maintain abandoned FOSS projects: https://www.codeshelter.co/ https://www.codeshelter.co/ Why rewrite stuff? Just see if people want what you're building first and then figure out whether it's well-written or needs a rewrite.

Delmania 8y ago

These questions are telling: * No one will actually use this. * Will designers really find this useful? * What if you launch and no one finds it valuable? Why not do some basic user research and get people to pay for it? This isn't some new ground, there are literally hundreds of internet gurus all saying that if you whip up a prototype, present it to people, and they pay for it, you'll have a higher chance of success.

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
Do you have experience with this? What if your prototype doesn't have any of the important functionality?
- Delmania 8y ago
  Then you analyze feedback and redo your prototype with what your customers need? The key thing is understand the underlying desire. Ford is famous for saying that if he asked people, they would tell him they wanted a faster horse. He understood they wanted a quicker means of transportation, so he built a car. That's what you do with the feedback of the prototype. Listen to responses, and adjust or abandon. As for experience? Not directly, but seriously, this isn't hard. This is literally the standard way every successful businesses operate. They analyze market demand, built an answer, get feedback, and adjust. Only very rarely does an individual's personal itch ever become a successful product.

milesvp 8y ago

It's a shame no one is really talking about the elephant in the room. At the end of the day, most people are working on side projects... at the end of the day. If you really want to be effective working on something that isn't your primary thing, it absolutely can't be after a full days work, even if that work isn't very taxing. Your mind needs time to not be working, or at least, not be working on things similar to your day job. Worse, is many people working on side projects are also doing it at the expense of sleep, which is kind of like doubling down on a losing bet. Sure you might get lucky, but you've still got a negative expected value from your time. People get dumb when they're tired, and worse, is they often can't even tell how dumb they've gotten. If you want to work on a side project, you probably don't want to work on it after work. And you probably don't want to work on it on your first of consecutive days off. Even writers who claim to be night owls tend to work on their writing first thing after a good sleep. Also, if you really want to validate this wisdom, I suggest learning to play a competitive game with a ranking system (although you may never get around to your side project if you do...). I would bet dollars to donuts to that you will tend to gain ELO/rating early in the day, and you will tend to lose ELO/rating late in the day. That has held true for me for any game I play seriously. It can be even worse at night, in that as you lose game after game, you start to go on tilt, and try to keep playing until you get that win, or until you gain back the rating you started with. It's absolutely insane, but often not obviously insane until the next morning. Also, probably just take my word on it, and don't game competitively, you're life will be richer without it. Just understand that there is a mountain of evidence that talks about how bad people are at performing when tired, and that the very best artists tend to spend most of their time recovering from their creative endeavors, punctuated by very short, very intense periods of exceedingly high focus.

brbrodude 8y ago
A good hack to this is to wake up earlier and work on your stuff first thing in the morning, allows you to spend that first energy on your real goals, and then you can move to other stuff. It's fucking hard for me to wake early, but I really need to get back to doing this. Edit: another advantage of this method is that you can have guilt-free relaxation on the end of the day.

ErikAugust 8y ago

This is relatable. I have even begun to read "War of Art". Consistency is key to momentum. My most recent project won an overall award at ETHDenver - which at the time became the world's largest cryptocurrency hackathon. My teammate and I created a cyberpunk-themed cryptocurrency trading game based on the classic Drugwars. My teammate is a great multimedia/graphic artist, and it was very well received. If interested, Beta is at https://www.cachethegame.com https://www.cachethegame.com. However, I would about 20% of the current total project (it's been 9 months) was completed in the 36 hours of the hackathon. We were on a roll. After the hackathon - we ended up talking to investors, but decided to pass. This is a double-edged sword with downside. "Side" projects are hard in the way self-guided learning is hard. You don't have people breathing down your neck periodically to keep you on track. The further we got along to releasing a Beta the more the "Resistance" crept in. To the point of, as soon as the Beta was released - basically taking several weeks off altogether. This is where some seed investment would have helped, besides the obvious ability to clear the calendar a bit. Forget big splashes of "raising a ton of money" or an ICO - it's practical to raise a bit money for reasons I mentioned.

ernsheong 8y ago

As a perfectionist myself, I continue to learn that you have to live with some "shit" in order to get your stuff out there. There's the tendency to rewrite/refactor, this makes side projects harder than it needs to be. It's self-defeating, really. There's plenty of time if you succeed, but no time if you don't. The perfectionism also prevents shipping because you want to avoid the impending negative feedback of your current project, and so you bounce off to something else. How to overcome? Experience (and failures) helps. You've spent so much perfection on something and it still didn't succeed the way you hoped. The next time you would care less about perfection and just ship.

viburnum 8y ago

It gets hard at the 90% point because that's when you realize your idea was bad, and nothing you can do at the last 10% will fix that.

magic_beans 8y ago

Note: this applies to finishing a novel manuscript as well. Source: self.

peterburkimsher 8y ago

Good luck. If you use your side project, it's worth it. If you learned new skills, the project taught you better than any textbook. Marketing is hard. If you ask people what they want, they don't know what they didn't imagine. (Insert quote by Henry Ford about a faster horse, or the St Pancras train station champagne bar, etc). It's better to build something first, and if people like it, continue developing it. I've made several Show HN, and occasionally even been offered jobs that way. I need a job now, and I've tried some more projects with that purpose, sadly without success. I think it shows motivation and initiative far better than a résumé, though, and attracts like-minded new friends.

pdimitar 8y ago
Landing a job you deem [almost] perfect for you is, as many other things, a matter of luck beyond many other factors. Very uncomfortable truth and something I had to gradually accept over being unemployed for 6 months (in fairness, I had enough money reserves to live very comfortably for 4 of them). I am not gonna bore you with my story but the bottom line is -- keep trying. As you said, marketing is hard. But very, VERY essential, including in how do you present yourself in interviews. In the end what landed me the job was an injection of optimism I got from a really good massage by my wife and then 8 hours of tight sleep -- I used that optimism to send out several more job applications to leads I deemed highly unlikely to even get a response from. And lo and behold, 3 days later I successfully moved through all phases of the interview process of one of the companies, and I am starting in several days. Don't let a bad period get to your head, no matter how long it may be. Persistence is basically your #1 advantage. Good luck to you!

austincheney 8y ago

My year long application update is finally nearing publication. The emotion and fear are very real. The psychosis resembles combat fatigue. It’s exhausting to think about, but I know people have waited on this and depend on my delivery.

burtonator 8y ago

This is my side project at the moment: https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ .. but it's sort of become full time. For me it started off as a need to manage my reading as I was working on another project around cryptocurrencies and reading tons of PDFs and web content. Got majorly side tracked but launched it and so far there are a few thousand active users.

SquishyPanda23 8y ago
Thanks, this looks super cool.
fvargas 8y ago
Thanks for sharing, this looks neat and useful! The pagemarks are an interesting concept. It would be cool if the top progress bar above the document showed, not cumulative progress, but the progress as it maps to the areas marked on the document, which aren't necessarily contiguous. Kinda like the progress bar you have for a torrent as non-contiguous chunks are downloaded. This provides spatial information about what parts of the document have been read.

happybuy 8y ago

I've found that if I can't just complete a certain feature, task or function on my product, and it keeps dragging on, then there is likely a reason for it being too difficult (more than just laziness on my part!) A good approach when this happens is to redefine the feature. Either by reconsidering its importance, investigating different ways to achieve a similar outcome or mostly decomposing the feature into even simpler and more minimal deliverables and implementations. Then deliver the extremely minimal implementation. In a lot of cases you then come back and make it more rounded later on, or in many cases, the simpler deliverable is actually all that is required and you move onto something else entirely. It's taking a disciplined and strict MVP approach to every task you have and focusing more on continual delivery as a north star. This tends to work because – as noted by the author – giving up on a side project is the biggest risk and one of the larger reasons for failure (you can't succeed if you don't show up). By always delivering something/anything you get the satisfaction and reward of progress which is a lot of times all that is needed to keep going.

mooreds 8y ago

I've run a side project for about 8 years ( https://farmshares.info https://farmshares.info ) with varying levels of effort and commitment (and income). I think it's key to realize: * you have to be really into solving the problem * you probably aren't going to make much money from it * a side project is a great way to experiment with different tech

ngrilly 8y ago

Why the rewrite from React to vanilla JS?

akavel 8y ago

Related Ask HN from a few months ago: "Why is nearing completion so demotivating?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17138794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17138794

finfun234 8y ago

Hi Dave, Kudos for sharing what you experienced. I actually completed a year working on https://shareseer.com https://shareseer.com on thanksgiving day. It is a side project. I have found shipping whenever a small milestone is hit to work for me. Another trick i use is to keep a backlog of items that need to be done, which brings me back to work on it. Thirdly I really care about the problem. Fourth an d finally I realized distribution is a vastly harder problem than product. Getting people to use what you build is the core of whether the product succeeds or not.

systematical 8y ago

12 years ago I could code on a side project 8 hours straight. It was fun and exciting. 6 years ago I could do that, but with less frequency. Today its a rare thing that I can even sit down and get in 4 hours in. My computer is littered with barely started projects and a few projects sitting around 50%-90% completed. The last side project I was able to hammer out was a thin API wrapper that I open sourced to github. It only took about 4 hours to code. It's a piece of a bigger project I am working on. Maybe thats a possible solution? Breaking your bigger project into smaller chunks?

craftyguy 8y ago
> Maybe thats a possible solution? Breaking your bigger project into smaller chunks? Definitely. Anything I cannot hammer out in a weekend I break into smaller chunks and treat each one as a separate project even though they are all contributing towards one larger one. This advice generally works great for any large type of problem or endeavour.

vonnik 8y ago

> "GET's"

ronreiter 8y ago

Great post! Added my two cents: https://medium.com/@ronreiter/why-side-projects-are-hard-psychologically-speaking-1672331ead79 https://medium.com/@ronreiter/why-side-projects-are-hard-psy...

thesz 8y ago

Obligatory reference to За миллиард лет до конца света: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitely_Maybe_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitely_Maybe_(novel) My friend developed first then Soviet software-controlled modem. He said they experienced more line cut-offs (hangups by telephone line operator) during testing next to the end of project (which was a success). He explained that their modem had crude analog adapter and caused a lot of noise and/or interference with the other phone company machinery. He said he also suspected KGB who they may thought that this is new voice scrambling device. Basically, the Resistance is real, but can be explained by some real factors, just like in the novel above.