9 ms·

It's OK to abandon your side-project

146 points by tobr 3y ago

rootcage 3y ago
Grit and perseverance are often talked about as critical qualities in building something successful but knowing when to quit and start over is equally as important. Food for thought, that most "startup" gurus don't preach.
- pier25 3y ago
  I agree but it's probably much more common for people to quit too early.
- murukesh_s 3y ago
  I thought it was the other way around nowadays, the 'lean' way?. Correct me if I am wrong, I thought founders are encouraged to pivot if can't find market fit early.
- abroadwin 3y ago
  Sunk cost fallacy is real.
- teh_infallible 3y ago
  There’s a big difference between quitting a side project and giving up on a startup. With the startup, you have other people depending on you. IMO, this is the real power you can leverage with a side project, the power to change your mind and bounce between completely different ideas. Those famous side projects that become companies? I’d bet that a lot of them were not the first or even third iteration.
itqwertz 3y ago
As long as you complete it, just keep it out there. You never know when your half-baked idea might result in a lead for something new. It’s fun to go back to old projects and finish them with new skills you’ve acquired over the years.
- steve_adams_86 3y ago
  It’s like returning to an early area in an RPG and discovering side quests and treasure chests you couldn’t reach before.
  - imbnwa 3y ago
    Found the Zhentarim hideout in Act 1 of Baldur’s Gate on my 4th playthrough
  - cnity 3y ago
    Total tangent, but I originally found Dark Souls too confusing and challenging and abandoned it. When I came back later for another try something clicked and it quickly became my favourite single player game of all time. It's funny how that works.
    - diggan 3y ago
      Had a similar experience with The Witcher 3. Tried to play it maybe 3-4 times, always abandoning it after one or two hours. Not until I got a Steam Deck and could play in the sofa/more comfortably and when away from home, that I actually got into the game, which is similarly one of my favorite games now :)
- higgins 3y ago
  good to keep this in mind while you're designing it. "will i be able to maintain this for 10+ years?"
  - david_allison 3y ago
    The greatest measure of a side-project's success is whether it can be maintained after you move on
- tppiotrowski 3y ago
  What if it becomes so popular it's costing hundreds of dollars to host. Asking for a friend...
SoftTalker 3y ago
Don't be afraid to eschew technology when paper flash cards will do the job.
jongjong 3y ago
Fear of sunk cost is why I only built developer tools so far. As a developer, I know what tool I need to build software quickly and effectively. But unfortunately just as I finished building my no-code/low-code platform, the dev tool market has become completely monopolized. All developers are focused on a tiny number of tools so now I'm forced to focus on a niche outside industry. Thankfully I can use my own no/low-code platform to build such apps very quickly so that's what I'll do.
- murukesh_s 3y ago
  Could you share the link to what you have built? Would love to take a look.. >developers are focused on a tiny number of tools Thats marketing. You think the market is saturated but we often see one new product comes and capture the entire market. Sometimes small changes like change of Licensing can swing users away from dominant players.
- bruce511 3y ago
  The dev tool market has always been completely monopolised. My own career started with Borland, then Microsoft took over. On Apple it was always objective C, and now Swift. Linux will jump every few years, as long as it's free. In truth developer tools are a tough sell because choices today matter 25 years from now. Plus you are selling to a market of people who mostly expect stuff for free, or write it themselves. Yes, it's a LOT easier to sell software to pretty much anyone else, so we'll done for identifying that. And yes, there are some still selling tools to developers, but its a tiny niche, and has been for 20 years.
- MarkinK 3y ago
  I just read your thoughts, and hey, I've been there with ozma-io. We're now diving into AI and LLM stuff, and it's super exciting! We've got this cool no-code AI feature live: https://ozma.io/ai-business-app-builder/ https://ozma.io/ai-business-app-builder/ It looks like we are at a new level of no-code programming. Real no-code. What if you try to add AI to your tool?
kazinator 3y ago
If you're explaining case to English speakers, don't use sentence with "he" and "her" as examples of how English does not have case, and does not allow easy rearrangement. Because those pronouns are the one place in English where vestiges of case can be found, making it confusing.
- networkchad 3y ago
  [dead]
- d1sxeyes 3y ago
  It's pretty hard to come up with examples of how something does not exist. I don't know if the article has been revised since it was posted, but now it uses proper nouns instead of pronouns. Another minor nit, verbs conjugate, nouns decline. Otherwise I quite enjoyed the article, although the idea that a 50 character or so regex will cover all your edge cases seems to be optimistic (never studied Latvian, but have some experience in learning various languages with case systems with varying degrees of success).
  - vitus 3y ago
    I think using pronouns with cases like I / me / my as a contrast to other nouns like "dog" would convey the difference. > the idea that a 50 character or so regex will cover all your edge cases seems to be optimistic At the very least. I'm thinking of Latin, where you can and will have ambiguity which declension a noun belongs to and what gender it is (e.g. frūctus (4th, m) vs pecus (3rd, f) vs pectus (3rd, n) vs actus (2nd, m)), and you just have to memorize which is which, since that entirely changes its endings as well as that of the corresponding adjective. Third declension is also wacky in that the stem isn't always present, e.g. pectus -> pectoris (where the stem here is pector-).
  - kazinator 3y ago
    English sentences with pronouns can show that cases exist in English, rather than that they don't. Without cases "she gave her number to him" becomes "she gave she number to he". Yet, that is precisely what we have when we substitute concrete names for the pronouns, except for the possessive: "Alice gave Alice's number to Bob". Pronoun cases and possessives convey the flavor of what it's like to use a language with full-blown case. You just have to use your imagination: what if all the nouns have cases, and there are six or seven of those cases. More cases means that, for instance, rather than one "her" word that can be used as "give to her", "do to her", "her number", "go with her" , the language will have different declensions.
jimbokun 3y ago
Great story of a successful failure. The app was a failure, because he learned everything he needed to know by writing the app. There are a lot of software projects that fail in the sense of not being released or used, but valuable from what was learned in the process of developing it.
- timwheeler 3y ago
  Agreed, just went through this after spending a year and a half adding a bunch of cool real-time features to an app of mine that no one asked for. Still a win because now I’ve “done it before” :)
BryanLegend 3y ago
Is it okay to abandon my 500th side project?
LAC-Tech 3y ago
No it's not, I put it on my Resume. Also it's a really good design.
winklevii 3y ago
[dead]
rjh29 3y ago
I had a similar experience writing a dictionary for Japanese person names based on usage frequency. In collecting the data I went from zero to being able to read the majority of names. I did end up making a frontend app for the data but I hardly ever use it.
shubhamjain 3y ago
It's a fair point, but I often see all the ideas I abandoned and realize how some of them could have become profitable had I persisted and not lost motivation. Even a tiny setback (say, no response on Hacker News) was enough for me to stop working on the idea, and start working on something new. Of course, you learn a lot along the way, but to have a successful side-hustle you need to learn to sustain and channel the motivation. As a creative person, motivation is a wild beast for me. Once I lose it for a project, reviving it feels impossible. But the mindset is a bit troubling. I don't think I would ever work on a project long-term working this way. So, while it's okay to abandon your side-project, it's important to make a mental note of why you're abandoning your project and if you can work on something better next time.
- tppiotrowski 3y ago
  Is your motivation validation or learning? If it's learning, each day will be a win...even if your user metrics are trending downwards. If it's validation, your motivation will fluctuate with your traffic patterns.
  - shubhamjain 3y ago
    Some projects are purely experimental, while some carry the hope that they can be monetized. My point is that I have a habit of abandoning hobbies, books, writing draft, and side-projects altogether thinking my motivation for them has been lost. I don't believe one should force themselves to finish things, but lost motivation is sometimes temporary or a sign of picking up not-so-good ideas. Realizing that and figuring out ways to sustain motivation is an important meta-skill.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    I don't know what you mean by "validation" though. Do you just mean praise? What if you just want to make some friends in open source? Truth is I've programming alone for over a decade. Loneliness is a crushing feeling, it feels like nothing matters and that everything is pointless. Recently people started generally interacting with my projects: creating issues, emailing me, I even received my vert first pull request. It feels really amazing, a very welcome change and also extremely motivating. Not sure if I'd call it "validation" though.
anonzzzies 3y ago
If you abandon and don’t plan for anything in the future, please MIT open source it. Maybe someone else likes it. So many nice things just disappear…
- dewey 3y ago
  That always sounds easier than it is in reality as usually when you came to terms with abandoning your project you don't want to go back to it and spend time on making sure there's no secrets checked in or hardcoded somewhere. There's no embarrassing comments you want to have public etc.
  - naitgacem 3y ago
    I am now realizing an app I was working on had some "vulgar" function names in tests. they've been changed, but they're still there in version control. I just hope no one looks at the history of tests...
    - teh_infallible 3y ago
      That’s hilarious :) The first time I worked on a project that used git, I got called out by a coworker for naming my branches after characters from Avatar, the Last Airbender.
    - thrwwycbr 3y ago
      All the unexplainable buggy behaviors on Microsoft systems. We understand, buddy, don't worry about it.
    - bonton89 3y ago
      This reminds me of the Dink Smallwood source code release. In addition to the author saying he was somewhat embarrassed with the quality of his code I remember the changelog included something like "Removed over 1500 instances of the word 'shit' from the code comments".
nxobject 3y ago
I'll admit I've had a few times where a work crunch forced me to put down a few side-projects, and I've never had the motivation to pick them back up again. I still stash them on GH for memory's sake.
netbioserror 3y ago
I’m at a point where my hobbyist time in college has translated into excellent product development at work. And now I just…don’t want to write code in my free time. That muscle is getting suitably flexed and I am using my non-work hours for numerous other fulfilling purposes. Maybe one day when I have an entrepreneurial idea worth pursuing I can hit the grindset, but right now is the moment for other things.
- charlie0 3y ago
  I'm stuck on this exact same problem. I want to code, but no longer want to do it for the sake of learning. I'll happily code for something that will get me true ROI, but haven't found what to dedicate my time to. I've realized I need to continue to learn, but that no longer applies specifically to the coding domain. I don't know if I can do it. Coding has instant feedback, most other things in life are not like that. The lack of instant feedback is demotivating.
bradley13 3y ago
I had a "successful" side project (specialized ERP system). Successful, in that I actually sold and supported a couple of copies. I tried to make thus into a full-time job. Mistake. Selling, networking, marketing. Unless you actively enjoy those activities, which will take up most of your time it is just an ugly grind. Plus you lose income, because you aren't working.
- rockbruno 3y ago
  I had the same experience. When we think about being our own boss we think it just means that we can code whatever we want, when in reality it means we are responsible for _everything_, including things we don't want to do. I too realised then that I absolutely hate selling, marketing, and dealing with angry customers.
DoreenMichele 3y ago
It's a fun post. I'm still -- after all these years -- a wannabe coder and I love it when a post about coding is something I can actually get through. Maybe someday I shall still grow up to be a real programmer and not just someone with a largely unused certificate in GIS who knows a little HTML and CSS.
anon115 3y ago
experiments....
edpichler 3y ago
How he made this font glowing? Which tool/IDE? https://robbowen.digital/assets/img/articles/lietvards-code.png https://robbowen.digital/assets/img/articles/lietvards-code....
- kevindamm 3y ago
  Not sure of tool/IDE but you can achieve that effect in HTML/CSS by use of text-shadow at 0px 0px and a reasonable value for the blur radius (maybe 5px or so). In computer graphics a similar glow effect is usually done by blurring and rendering that just under the source image/mesh. Pretty similar to the above. Sorry don't have an idea of the tool in use by the author.
- cnity 3y ago
  It looks like the SynthWave '84 extension for VS Code: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=RobbOwen.synthwave-vscode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=RobbOwen... Personally I think it looks awful but everyone to their own tastes!
- aidomi 3y ago
  Pretty sure he's using "Synthwave '84': https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=RobbOwen.synthwave-vscode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=RobbOwen...
__s 3y ago
I gave up on a side-project Nearly a decade ago when WASM was new I started trying to implement a pure WASM lua implementation. With eventual goal to JIT, so I was writing it all in Lua to bootstrap I wrote a macro assembler in lua, & implemented objects, tables, garbage collector, lexer/parser. But when I got to the bytecode VM I got tangled trying to implement opcodes while dealing with "every allocation invalidates references because it's a moving GC" I was keeping a devlog on patreon (mostly stream of consciousness posts) & had a couple people supporting for a total ~10$/mo. Shortly after development stalled I paused payments Despite having a successful open source card game (openEtG), Luwa remains my most starred project on github: https://github.com/serprex/luwa https://github.com/serprex/luwa I regretted stalling on this project for a long time, since it was a bit of a cumulation of my minimalist philosophy (wasm without some emscripten runtime, the stack was just another object in the lua heap, etc), & I failed to deliver I've come to peace with the fact that I'm not Mike Pall
ivanjermakov 3y ago
It took me a while to understand why I do side projects. Turns out that creating something big is never the answer. Mostly it's way to learn something new, tackle some hard problems and understand them to a certain depth.
bhupesh 3y ago
> Out of all of my abandoned side-projects, this was the one that made me think differently. Even if I would never actually use the end 'deliverable', working on the project still indirectly achieved what I'd set out to do. That led me to an important realisation: we talk a lot about abandoned side-projects as "failed", but their success is really a matter of perspective. Very much agreed here, abandoning things helps us eventually priortise other things that we learned from the exercise of building the original thing. I briefly wrote about a similar experience on how thinking too much about maintaining a project for a longer period of time is not really a good idea. https://buttondown.email/bhupesh/archive/why-its-ok-to-abandon-your-side-projects/ https://buttondown.email/bhupesh/archive/why-its-ok-to-aband...
davnicwil 3y ago
> The tech stack would be simple too. At the time of planning, Svelte 3.0 was the new shiny so I decided to use it for my UI. I knew that I wanted to host everything on Netlify, so for the backend I'd write a couple serverless functions to present the questions and check the answers. The main list of nouns could be served from a static JSON file and, as I'd be the only user, I could safely persist previous quiz results and a high-score to local storage. To be blunt this is exactly the kind of stack that you'll regret hard if you ever come back to pick up an abandoned project. They always seem simple at the time when the whole system is loaded into your brain, but will be utterly incomprehensible on cold start in a year, especially when the cool stuff you stitched together has itself respectively moved on several major versions. I've learned this the hard way from trying to revisit several abandoned projects over the years. Seriously, just use your language's equivalent of rails, and follow all the conventions. That way you can go right to the docs in future and pick up where you left off.
Xeyz0r 3y ago
It is vital to understand how you can maintain your motivation on side projects. Of course it's ok but it should not become the question of your personal development at the end.
shantnutiwari 3y ago
my problem is I have more abandoned projects than successful ones :/ And not from lack of trying...
mock-possum 3y ago
> tech-interviewers will routinely measure candidates by the output of their extra-curricular coding Is this true, or is it a myth? It’s a patently unfair metric to measure someone’s professional aptitude by what they doin their free time, everyone knows it, no one wants to be held to that standard… how common is it, actually, that employers expect you to clock out of your day job getting paid to write code, and proceed to your second unpaid job of writing more code? I don’t think I’ve ever encountered any indication during the hiring process that a potential employer was disappointed to see my lack of ‘shipped’ side projects. Ever!

146 points by tobr 3y ago

Grit and perseverance are often talked about as critical qualities in building something successful but knowing when to quit and start over is equally as important. Food for thought, that most "startup" gurus don't preach.

pier25 3y ago
I agree but it's probably much more common for people to quit too early.
murukesh_s 3y ago
I thought it was the other way around nowadays, the 'lean' way?. Correct me if I am wrong, I thought founders are encouraged to pivot if can't find market fit early.
abroadwin 3y ago
Sunk cost fallacy is real.
teh_infallible 3y ago
There’s a big difference between quitting a side project and giving up on a startup. With the startup, you have other people depending on you. IMO, this is the real power you can leverage with a side project, the power to change your mind and bounce between completely different ideas. Those famous side projects that become companies? I’d bet that a lot of them were not the first or even third iteration.

itqwertz 3y ago

As long as you complete it, just keep it out there. You never know when your half-baked idea might result in a lead for something new. It’s fun to go back to old projects and finish them with new skills you’ve acquired over the years.

steve_adams_86 3y ago
It’s like returning to an early area in an RPG and discovering side quests and treasure chests you couldn’t reach before.
- imbnwa 3y ago
  Found the Zhentarim hideout in Act 1 of Baldur’s Gate on my 4th playthrough
- cnity 3y ago
  Total tangent, but I originally found Dark Souls too confusing and challenging and abandoned it. When I came back later for another try something clicked and it quickly became my favourite single player game of all time. It's funny how that works.
  - diggan 3y ago
    Had a similar experience with The Witcher 3. Tried to play it maybe 3-4 times, always abandoning it after one or two hours. Not until I got a Steam Deck and could play in the sofa/more comfortably and when away from home, that I actually got into the game, which is similarly one of my favorite games now :)
higgins 3y ago
good to keep this in mind while you're designing it. "will i be able to maintain this for 10+ years?"
- david_allison 3y ago
  The greatest measure of a side-project's success is whether it can be maintained after you move on
tppiotrowski 3y ago
What if it becomes so popular it's costing hundreds of dollars to host. Asking for a friend...

SoftTalker 3y ago

Don't be afraid to eschew technology when paper flash cards will do the job.

jongjong 3y ago

Fear of sunk cost is why I only built developer tools so far. As a developer, I know what tool I need to build software quickly and effectively. But unfortunately just as I finished building my no-code/low-code platform, the dev tool market has become completely monopolized. All developers are focused on a tiny number of tools so now I'm forced to focus on a niche outside industry. Thankfully I can use my own no/low-code platform to build such apps very quickly so that's what I'll do.

murukesh_s 3y ago
Could you share the link to what you have built? Would love to take a look.. >developers are focused on a tiny number of tools Thats marketing. You think the market is saturated but we often see one new product comes and capture the entire market. Sometimes small changes like change of Licensing can swing users away from dominant players.
bruce511 3y ago
The dev tool market has always been completely monopolised. My own career started with Borland, then Microsoft took over. On Apple it was always objective C, and now Swift. Linux will jump every few years, as long as it's free. In truth developer tools are a tough sell because choices today matter 25 years from now. Plus you are selling to a market of people who mostly expect stuff for free, or write it themselves. Yes, it's a LOT easier to sell software to pretty much anyone else, so we'll done for identifying that. And yes, there are some still selling tools to developers, but its a tiny niche, and has been for 20 years.
MarkinK 3y ago
I just read your thoughts, and hey, I've been there with ozma-io. We're now diving into AI and LLM stuff, and it's super exciting! We've got this cool no-code AI feature live: https://ozma.io/ai-business-app-builder/ https://ozma.io/ai-business-app-builder/ It looks like we are at a new level of no-code programming. Real no-code. What if you try to add AI to your tool?

kazinator 3y ago

If you're explaining case to English speakers, don't use sentence with "he" and "her" as examples of how English does not have case, and does not allow easy rearrangement. Because those pronouns are the one place in English where vestiges of case can be found, making it confusing.

networkchad 3y ago
[dead]
d1sxeyes 3y ago
It's pretty hard to come up with examples of how something does not exist. I don't know if the article has been revised since it was posted, but now it uses proper nouns instead of pronouns. Another minor nit, verbs conjugate, nouns decline. Otherwise I quite enjoyed the article, although the idea that a 50 character or so regex will cover all your edge cases seems to be optimistic (never studied Latvian, but have some experience in learning various languages with case systems with varying degrees of success).
- vitus 3y ago
  I think using pronouns with cases like I / me / my as a contrast to other nouns like "dog" would convey the difference. > the idea that a 50 character or so regex will cover all your edge cases seems to be optimistic At the very least. I'm thinking of Latin, where you can and will have ambiguity which declension a noun belongs to and what gender it is (e.g. frūctus (4th, m) vs pecus (3rd, f) vs pectus (3rd, n) vs actus (2nd, m)), and you just have to memorize which is which, since that entirely changes its endings as well as that of the corresponding adjective. Third declension is also wacky in that the stem isn't always present, e.g. pectus -> pectoris (where the stem here is pector-).
- kazinator 3y ago
  English sentences with pronouns can show that cases exist in English, rather than that they don't. Without cases "she gave her number to him" becomes "she gave she number to he". Yet, that is precisely what we have when we substitute concrete names for the pronouns, except for the possessive: "Alice gave Alice's number to Bob". Pronoun cases and possessives convey the flavor of what it's like to use a language with full-blown case. You just have to use your imagination: what if all the nouns have cases, and there are six or seven of those cases. More cases means that, for instance, rather than one "her" word that can be used as "give to her", "do to her", "her number", "go with her" , the language will have different declensions.

jimbokun 3y ago

Great story of a successful failure. The app was a failure, because he learned everything he needed to know by writing the app. There are a lot of software projects that fail in the sense of not being released or used, but valuable from what was learned in the process of developing it.

timwheeler 3y ago
Agreed, just went through this after spending a year and a half adding a bunch of cool real-time features to an app of mine that no one asked for. Still a win because now I’ve “done it before” :)

BryanLegend 3y ago

Is it okay to abandon my 500th side project?

LAC-Tech 3y ago

No it's not, I put it on my Resume. Also it's a really good design.

winklevii 3y ago

[dead]

rjh29 3y ago

I had a similar experience writing a dictionary for Japanese person names based on usage frequency. In collecting the data I went from zero to being able to read the majority of names. I did end up making a frontend app for the data but I hardly ever use it.

shubhamjain 3y ago

It's a fair point, but I often see all the ideas I abandoned and realize how some of them could have become profitable had I persisted and not lost motivation. Even a tiny setback (say, no response on Hacker News) was enough for me to stop working on the idea, and start working on something new. Of course, you learn a lot along the way, but to have a successful side-hustle you need to learn to sustain and channel the motivation. As a creative person, motivation is a wild beast for me. Once I lose it for a project, reviving it feels impossible. But the mindset is a bit troubling. I don't think I would ever work on a project long-term working this way. So, while it's okay to abandon your side-project, it's important to make a mental note of why you're abandoning your project and if you can work on something better next time.

tppiotrowski 3y ago
Is your motivation validation or learning? If it's learning, each day will be a win...even if your user metrics are trending downwards. If it's validation, your motivation will fluctuate with your traffic patterns.
- shubhamjain 3y ago
  Some projects are purely experimental, while some carry the hope that they can be monetized. My point is that I have a habit of abandoning hobbies, books, writing draft, and side-projects altogether thinking my motivation for them has been lost. I don't believe one should force themselves to finish things, but lost motivation is sometimes temporary or a sign of picking up not-so-good ideas. Realizing that and figuring out ways to sustain motivation is an important meta-skill.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  I don't know what you mean by "validation" though. Do you just mean praise? What if you just want to make some friends in open source? Truth is I've programming alone for over a decade. Loneliness is a crushing feeling, it feels like nothing matters and that everything is pointless. Recently people started generally interacting with my projects: creating issues, emailing me, I even received my vert first pull request. It feels really amazing, a very welcome change and also extremely motivating. Not sure if I'd call it "validation" though.

anonzzzies 3y ago

If you abandon and don’t plan for anything in the future, please MIT open source it. Maybe someone else likes it. So many nice things just disappear…

dewey 3y ago
That always sounds easier than it is in reality as usually when you came to terms with abandoning your project you don't want to go back to it and spend time on making sure there's no secrets checked in or hardcoded somewhere. There's no embarrassing comments you want to have public etc.
- naitgacem 3y ago
  I am now realizing an app I was working on had some "vulgar" function names in tests. they've been changed, but they're still there in version control. I just hope no one looks at the history of tests...
  - teh_infallible 3y ago
    That’s hilarious :) The first time I worked on a project that used git, I got called out by a coworker for naming my branches after characters from Avatar, the Last Airbender.
  - thrwwycbr 3y ago
    All the unexplainable buggy behaviors on Microsoft systems. We understand, buddy, don't worry about it.
  - bonton89 3y ago
    This reminds me of the Dink Smallwood source code release. In addition to the author saying he was somewhat embarrassed with the quality of his code I remember the changelog included something like "Removed over 1500 instances of the word 'shit' from the code comments".

nxobject 3y ago

I'll admit I've had a few times where a work crunch forced me to put down a few side-projects, and I've never had the motivation to pick them back up again. I still stash them on GH for memory's sake.

netbioserror 3y ago

I’m at a point where my hobbyist time in college has translated into excellent product development at work. And now I just…don’t want to write code in my free time. That muscle is getting suitably flexed and I am using my non-work hours for numerous other fulfilling purposes. Maybe one day when I have an entrepreneurial idea worth pursuing I can hit the grindset, but right now is the moment for other things.

charlie0 3y ago
I'm stuck on this exact same problem. I want to code, but no longer want to do it for the sake of learning. I'll happily code for something that will get me true ROI, but haven't found what to dedicate my time to. I've realized I need to continue to learn, but that no longer applies specifically to the coding domain. I don't know if I can do it. Coding has instant feedback, most other things in life are not like that. The lack of instant feedback is demotivating.

bradley13 3y ago

I had a "successful" side project (specialized ERP system). Successful, in that I actually sold and supported a couple of copies. I tried to make thus into a full-time job. Mistake. Selling, networking, marketing. Unless you actively enjoy those activities, which will take up most of your time it is just an ugly grind. Plus you lose income, because you aren't working.

rockbruno 3y ago
I had the same experience. When we think about being our own boss we think it just means that we can code whatever we want, when in reality it means we are responsible for _everything_, including things we don't want to do. I too realised then that I absolutely hate selling, marketing, and dealing with angry customers.

DoreenMichele 3y ago

It's a fun post. I'm still -- after all these years -- a wannabe coder and I love it when a post about coding is something I can actually get through. Maybe someday I shall still grow up to be a real programmer and not just someone with a largely unused certificate in GIS who knows a little HTML and CSS.

anon115 3y ago

experiments....

edpichler 3y ago

How he made this font glowing? Which tool/IDE? https://robbowen.digital/assets/img/articles/lietvards-code.png https://robbowen.digital/assets/img/articles/lietvards-code....

kevindamm 3y ago
Not sure of tool/IDE but you can achieve that effect in HTML/CSS by use of text-shadow at 0px 0px and a reasonable value for the blur radius (maybe 5px or so). In computer graphics a similar glow effect is usually done by blurring and rendering that just under the source image/mesh. Pretty similar to the above. Sorry don't have an idea of the tool in use by the author.
cnity 3y ago
It looks like the SynthWave '84 extension for VS Code: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=RobbOwen.synthwave-vscode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=RobbOwen... Personally I think it looks awful but everyone to their own tastes!
aidomi 3y ago
Pretty sure he's using "Synthwave '84': https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=RobbOwen.synthwave-vscode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=RobbOwen...

__s 3y ago

I gave up on a side-project Nearly a decade ago when WASM was new I started trying to implement a pure WASM lua implementation. With eventual goal to JIT, so I was writing it all in Lua to bootstrap I wrote a macro assembler in lua, & implemented objects, tables, garbage collector, lexer/parser. But when I got to the bytecode VM I got tangled trying to implement opcodes while dealing with "every allocation invalidates references because it's a moving GC" I was keeping a devlog on patreon (mostly stream of consciousness posts) & had a couple people supporting for a total ~10$/mo. Shortly after development stalled I paused payments Despite having a successful open source card game (openEtG), Luwa remains my most starred project on github: https://github.com/serprex/luwa https://github.com/serprex/luwa I regretted stalling on this project for a long time, since it was a bit of a cumulation of my minimalist philosophy (wasm without some emscripten runtime, the stack was just another object in the lua heap, etc), & I failed to deliver I've come to peace with the fact that I'm not Mike Pall

ivanjermakov 3y ago

It took me a while to understand why I do side projects. Turns out that creating something big is never the answer. Mostly it's way to learn something new, tackle some hard problems and understand them to a certain depth.

bhupesh 3y ago

> Out of all of my abandoned side-projects, this was the one that made me think differently. Even if I would never actually use the end 'deliverable', working on the project still indirectly achieved what I'd set out to do. That led me to an important realisation: we talk a lot about abandoned side-projects as "failed", but their success is really a matter of perspective. Very much agreed here, abandoning things helps us eventually priortise other things that we learned from the exercise of building the original thing. I briefly wrote about a similar experience on how thinking too much about maintaining a project for a longer period of time is not really a good idea. https://buttondown.email/bhupesh/archive/why-its-ok-to-abandon-your-side-projects/ https://buttondown.email/bhupesh/archive/why-its-ok-to-aband...

davnicwil 3y ago

> The tech stack would be simple too. At the time of planning, Svelte 3.0 was the new shiny so I decided to use it for my UI. I knew that I wanted to host everything on Netlify, so for the backend I'd write a couple serverless functions to present the questions and check the answers. The main list of nouns could be served from a static JSON file and, as I'd be the only user, I could safely persist previous quiz results and a high-score to local storage. To be blunt this is exactly the kind of stack that you'll regret hard if you ever come back to pick up an abandoned project. They always seem simple at the time when the whole system is loaded into your brain, but will be utterly incomprehensible on cold start in a year, especially when the cool stuff you stitched together has itself respectively moved on several major versions. I've learned this the hard way from trying to revisit several abandoned projects over the years. Seriously, just use your language's equivalent of rails, and follow all the conventions. That way you can go right to the docs in future and pick up where you left off.

Xeyz0r 3y ago

It is vital to understand how you can maintain your motivation on side projects. Of course it's ok but it should not become the question of your personal development at the end.

shantnutiwari 3y ago

my problem is I have more abandoned projects than successful ones :/ And not from lack of trying...

mock-possum 3y ago

> tech-interviewers will routinely measure candidates by the output of their extra-curricular coding Is this true, or is it a myth? It’s a patently unfair metric to measure someone’s professional aptitude by what they doin their free time, everyone knows it, no one wants to be held to that standard… how common is it, actually, that employers expect you to clock out of your day job getting paid to write code, and proceed to your second unpaid job of writing more code? I don’t think I’ve ever encountered any indication during the hiring process that a potential employer was disappointed to see my lack of ‘shipped’ side projects. Ever!