4 ms·

Do or do not. There is no try. ~ Yoda I don't understand this idea of a Forever Project. A project/task is either important enough to do or it's a distraction

Do or do not. There is no try. ~ Yoda I don't understand this idea of a Forever Project. A project/task is either important enough to do or it's a distraction in your life. Now if you're working towards that project because you don't have the resources, knowledge, people, at this point in time, you're making progress and that's a different story.

Maro 14y ago
Take me as an example. My Forever Project is Physics. I have a degree in both CS and Physics. I made the decision years ago to work in the industry as a programmer, because it's more fun and pays better than being an academic, especially where I live. I'm not officially involved with my old University, but I still take part in their mailing lists, think about Physics in my free time, I even submit simple papers to journals [+]. I don't have delusions about being a good physicists or ever doing anything of any importance, but Physics still fascinates me, I like to ponder its problems and sometimes marvel at its beauty. [+] http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.4990 http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.4990 Edit: Btw. you are right in saying that these things are a "distraction in life", but I think it's a good distraction, like a hobby.
- melvinram 14y ago
  I'm not sure I see this as a forever project, as a forever project would have a way to know when you're done, IMO. Physics for you is an interest and a hobby. Those are great to keep you informed.
vidarh 14y ago
Why does everything you do have to be important? Do you not have hobbies? Don't you enjoy relaxing with something that is totally pointless? I feel sorry for you if you don't have space in your life to enjoy some unimportant things just for the sake of it.
- melvinram 14y ago
  Relaxing isn't a project in my view. It's life.
noptic 14y ago
My forever project tought my many Important things. Since I do not have to reach a target I can try solving old problems in new ways and see how it works out in the long run. My forever project spawned some nice sub modules which I use in productiv code. In some branches of my forever project I tryed things generally known to be bad style to see some of the problems myself.
- melvinram 14y ago
  That's why I included my last sentence.
w0utert 14y ago
Sometimes the goal of a personal side-project is not to produce something meaningful, but just to learn and have fun while doing it. If I take myself as an example: I have this git repository checked out as 'coding' on all my machines, which has about 15 different folders containing projects ranging from simple prototyping experiments to fully-finished projects. Only a single folder contains a project that was ever released publicly (an iOS port of a classic MS-DOS game). Everything else is half-way finished at best. Does that mean writing all that unfinished code was merely 'a distraction'? I don't think so. All of this started out as just a way to learn about something I knew nothing about before, and most of the time I stopped working on things the moment I was satisfied with what I learned. There's an arithmetic coder in there, a marching squares implementation, an MPEG-2 decoder that fully works but is dog-slow and doesn't process the color channels, a framework for 2D pattern recognition, a component-based Python web framework, a web application that was intended as a tracker for poker scores, and some other things I can't remember. If I had set out to complete all of these projects, I would probably have finished 1 or 2 and still know nothing about the theory that got me interested in the other 13 or so.

Maro 14y ago

Take me as an example. My Forever Project is Physics. I have a degree in both CS and Physics. I made the decision years ago to work in the industry as a programmer, because it's more fun and pays better than being an academic, especially where I live. I'm not officially involved with my old University, but I still take part in their mailing lists, think about Physics in my free time, I even submit simple papers to journals [+]. I don't have delusions about being a good physicists or ever doing anything of any importance, but Physics still fascinates me, I like to ponder its problems and sometimes marvel at its beauty. [+] http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.4990 http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.4990 Edit: Btw. you are right in saying that these things are a "distraction in life", but I think it's a good distraction, like a hobby.

melvinram 14y ago
I'm not sure I see this as a forever project, as a forever project would have a way to know when you're done, IMO. Physics for you is an interest and a hobby. Those are great to keep you informed.

vidarh 14y ago

Why does everything you do have to be important? Do you not have hobbies? Don't you enjoy relaxing with something that is totally pointless? I feel sorry for you if you don't have space in your life to enjoy some unimportant things just for the sake of it.

melvinram 14y ago
Relaxing isn't a project in my view. It's life.

noptic 14y ago

My forever project tought my many Important things. Since I do not have to reach a target I can try solving old problems in new ways and see how it works out in the long run. My forever project spawned some nice sub modules which I use in productiv code. In some branches of my forever project I tryed things generally known to be bad style to see some of the problems myself.

melvinram 14y ago
That's why I included my last sentence.

w0utert 14y ago

Sometimes the goal of a personal side-project is not to produce something meaningful, but just to learn and have fun while doing it. If I take myself as an example: I have this git repository checked out as 'coding' on all my machines, which has about 15 different folders containing projects ranging from simple prototyping experiments to fully-finished projects. Only a single folder contains a project that was ever released publicly (an iOS port of a classic MS-DOS game). Everything else is half-way finished at best. Does that mean writing all that unfinished code was merely 'a distraction'? I don't think so. All of this started out as just a way to learn about something I knew nothing about before, and most of the time I stopped working on things the moment I was satisfied with what I learned. There's an arithmetic coder in there, a marching squares implementation, an MPEG-2 decoder that fully works but is dog-slow and doesn't process the color channels, a framework for 2D pattern recognition, a component-based Python web framework, a web application that was intended as a tracker for poker scores, and some other things I can't remember. If I had set out to complete all of these projects, I would probably have finished 1 or 2 and still know nothing about the theory that got me interested in the other 13 or so.