How I Shipped Six Side Projects in 2017 | Hacker News Reader

How I Shipped Six Side Projects in 2017

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224 pointsrbanffy110 comments

I have also finished 6 side projects last year: 1) Moving the washing machine with all plumbing to the attic. 2) Getting the kids to school on time everyday. 3) Having the kids eat at least 1 piece of fruit each day. 4) Redid my front garden to make it easier to park 3 bikes. 5) Made a bunk bed in my caravan for the two kids. 6) Played a bit with the Bittrex api and made a small overview website for myself.

I'm feeling pretty good about those things (and actually I did even more, bathing my 1 y/o daughter every two days, also quite some work. I also helped in teaching my son to wipe his own butt and wash his hands without touching anything else on the way to the tap... I could go on...).

This year was the launch of Daughter 2.0 (years). I must say, this product is looking to be awesome. Although she sometimes intentionally doesn't follow the instructions I give her.

Unlike Daughter 1.0 that simply didn't follow instructions because she wasn't programmed to do so yet.

I must say, Daughter 0.1 was fun to conceive but the nine months leading up to launch were rough and the year after we first showed her to the public we had a lot of issues to work out. Me and my partner were up all night for a year working out bugs.

I'm still working on launching my Basement Playroom side project. I have the walls framed out but finding an outsourcing firm for the wiring for a reasonable price has been tough. Finishing the Baby-proofing side project felt good though.

I also have two software side projects. Both built on AWS Lambda... those have gotten nowhere due to my primary hustle.

That's still the fun part. Wait until your product starts getting traction and you need to build 24/7 customer support capabilities.

The real hard part is we don't have enough funding to recruit more staff and I don't think we'll have an exit until we hit version 18.0 and that won't be for 16 more years. And even then, I hear some projects get to version 24.0 before being able to be self sustaining.

I've heard that you can allocate roughly 25% FTE by version 14.0.

I'm only on v3.5 of the first product. Generally the AI is working well, deep learning is starting to show dividends in many areas. Last night the Self Tidying function actually worked for the first time, although some items were not necessarily stored at the correct allocation addresses. The main problems we're encountering now is AI self awareness and trying to force its own learning path, despite continual re-training on controlled datasets.

Use less reinforcement and more random forest.

This whole thread feels like I'm reading r/outside, the HN version. I like it.

As long as you’re default live you should be proud.

Not to mention that support gets really demanding once you hit version 13.0. Also, for Daughter 16.0+ I hear a good firewall is essential.

Honest question here:

Why do people use my partner and I, and not my spouse and I?

In all honesty, when I read my partner and I and I assume it is a same-sex couple, and spouse and I as a heterosexual couple.

Did language change when describe couples?

Why do you assume same sex couple? It could just be a couple that decided to have a child together without getting married,

I actually chose to use the word "partner" because it is more closely analog to the startup metaphor (i.e. "business partner") so it fit the joke better.

Impressive! How did you get all that done without any "public deadline" and "sharing your work" with the rest of the world? Also, I guess there was only few "supportive feedback for what you’re doing" (perhaps just from a single person, but how much does that count?), which makes this even more impressive.

Loved this -- you called these "side-projects", but in general, this is "life" :-)....you do a lot of incidental "stuff". Specially when you have kids.

You should, that stuff is awesome!!!

Curious to know what your method was to teaching the butt wiping. I need to teach my kid this.

It's nice when they can wipe their own butt, a milestone.

Congratulations! :)

Some people prefer to maximize earnings and then outsource manual labour. Also processes are not projects. The website sounds cool though.

I'm just adding it here because bathing your daughter every 2 days (and getting her to bed clean, well fed and happy) is a ton of work which you don't want to outsource and can not add to your CV or Github page.

To be honest, even if you don't have kids and are just tired of work in the evenings, my advice would be: Don't let these over-energetic side project cannons get under your skin. Just making a living is something to be proud of as well. People who write such posts may be good side project creators, but they may suck at other things. Or maybe they don't, maybe they are better people in every respect. I choose not to care, or perhaps better: I choose to try consciously not to allow myself to feel bad about this.

It's hard enough in this connected world to try and find out what you like, feeling down comparing yourself to super productive people will only do that: make you feel down. It's the worst feeling to have while you're trying to find out what makes your clock tick (inhibiting I would even say). Young people often don't know what makes them enthusiastic, nothing wrong with that, also nothing wrong if it is doing nothing, daydreaming instead of firing off side project after side project. It'll come... Or it won't. First mission: Accept yourself as you are.

I'm thinking they're probably just more unmarried, more childless people in every respect.

That's a pretty big assumption, probably not based on anything other than your gut feeling?

LOL! I'd say it's a fairly minor assumption to say he probably doesn't have small children. The sheer amount of time and effort that children can consume is mindblowing. A six month old gets bored in ways I didn't think possible for something with so little experience in the world. And god forbid you walk away to do some chore, the cry of abandonment makes it impossible to focus on anything else. And then you think, oh by 6 they should be able to help with things, but the mental effort to get any sort of chore out the child dwarfs the effort to do the chore yourself. And when all the children are finally asleep, that's when the PTSD shows itself. Will a child decide bedtime wasn't executed to their liking and come knocking on your door in 30 minutes? And when will the youngest cry for their first night time feeding? Can I start this activity that will likely take an hour? Do I dare stay up? or will tonight be a 4 cries in 4 hours kind of night?

> And when all the children are finally asleep, that's when the PTSD shows itself.

So true. Or if they get sick and you wonder when it'll hit you too – in an hour, tomorrow or in a week. Having 2 kids is, at times, the most stressful and anxiety-inducing thing I ever did in my entire life.

Children consume a great deal of time and energy. Even after they're bathed and put to bed, cleaning and preparing for the next day eat into "adult" time in the night. Even splitting a perfect 50/50 with your partner (if you have one) doesn't leave much time for personal projects.

Having a house also means spending time on its care. Not nearly as much as children, but it's a non negligible amount.

Marriage can be less of a barrier to personal projects. Just depending your relationship and schedule.

Well thinking it is not based on research, otherwise I would say after researching the matter... so based on my gut feeling, I guess, maybe based on feelings on how many side projects I used to get done in a year versus how many I get done now. I don't know that I would call it an assumption, since an assumption I think of as something I will proceed from, as the basis of decisions and I'm not making any particular decisions based on what I think on this issue.

@jeffhuys my gut feel says you don't have childeren. At least not in the 0-3 yr range :-)

(Could not reply directly to sibling comment)

I read this in the voice of Maester Aemon.

Completely agree now that I not so suddenly have a girlfriend and her 10-year-old boy to think about. It changes things. A lot. And we're not married, and the kid isn't even mine.

But every aspect of my life has changed. All of my priorities have changed. That woman and that kid are all I care about after I leave work. And when I leave work, I fucking leave it.

I agree with what you said. Everyone needs to accept who and where they are. But I know this: I'm no longer interested in the gigs that take me away from my family. Not my girlfriend or her son, not my dad or mom, or my brothers either.

I've done my time with that pretentious horseshit. I'll take a job real close to the people who spent their lives loving me and give it back now.

Different people will feel different ways. For sure.

I've been on a mini-quest to reject the concept of exceptionalism.

It started with an observation that everywhere we traveled seemed wonderful and fun, full of people who can't imagine living anywhere else. Every place[1] seems to have some thing that makes it feel special when you visit. If you live there, it's a different story, though. Sort of like how people who live in Philadelphia don't visit the Liberty Bell. Or there are only just so many times you can visit the museums in Washington DC before the daily routine of life breaks the spell.

I grew up in a rural town and worked pretty hard to find a job that would move me out of it. Having lived in a few major cities now, I can say that the place that you live doesn't have a lot of impact on how happy you can be. I was depressed when I lived in the middle of nowhere and I was depressed all over again shortly after moving to a big city. It wasn't until I started letting go of the concept of finding happiness through acquiring lifestyle markers that I started feeling whole.

And I've noticed this applies to pretty much everything. Everyone has a cherished childhood toy or video game or movie to which every new experience is compared. Everyone has a story about their university experience that ends with, "you just had to be there, it was a different time. The place was never the same after." Everyone has an in-the-trenches story about an old job.

But those experiences are apocryphal. Other people were having similar experiences with other things, repeated cookie-cutter across the world. The particular things they were experiencing may have even been better than what we experienced. But that's not why things are great. Our memories of the greatness of things are not a function of how good they were in comparison to other things, or how few people got to experience them as well. Our experience of greatness is a function of our being present in the moment, absorbing and making memories of the feelings we had. Why should the knowledge that some other folks experienced a better thing, or many other folks experienced the same thing we did, change how we feel about what happened to us? They can't go into the past and change events. We still have those memories of those feelings.

And then we die and it all evaporates. There will be mostly no record of the wonders we experienced. What little record will be stored and propagated will mostly go completely ignored. And what little that will be received will be misinterpreted.

This applies to everything. The Quest for The Best is a fallacy, as it presumes the ability to replay all choices in parallel universes and select the universe that has the best results (assuming we can even calculate what The Best even means). Yet so many people are consumed by finding The Best and rejecting everything else. It locks them into a cycle of indecision as they thrash over infinite options, causing an ever growing anxiety that feeds into itself.

Sound like anything? Arguing politics. Choosing a restaurant in a group. Choosing a meal once/if you ever get there. Choosing an application development framework. We choose to attempt to drink from the fire hose, then reinterpret it as drowning in a hurricane at sea when you could just remove your head from the fire hose stream.

Be resolute in accepting that you will die and that none of the struggle for anything beyond your own happiness, enjoyment, and completeness matters. You are free to choose what will compose your happiness. You have a place in life and it is your own place that you are free to enjoy, regardless of how unique or objectively great it might be.

Ironically, once you do that, you might even be able to achieve the clarity and focus of mind necessary to make a unique and great thing. Because you won't care, you'll just make the thing for your enjoyment.

[1] to which one would travel, granted. Old coal mining towns are just exercises in communal depression.

Well said.

> Our experience of greatness is a function of our being present in the moment, absorbing and making memories of the feelings we had. Why should the knowledge that some other folks experienced a better thing, or many other folks experienced the same thing we did, change how we feel about what happened to us?

Back in the early 90s I had the highest score on the Street Fighter(?) cabinet in the local pizza joint. Try as they might, nobody could beat it-- I was a god amongst the neighborhood kids. Then 1996 came around, and with the internet came evidence of what high scores other people around the world were hitting. The best I could do, what my peers were proud of me for, meant nothing when held up against the greater community. My world was crushed. I was nothing special. If my friends were this proud of a loser, then they must be losers themselves.

But for the brief period of time in which I lived in ignorance, hanging out with friends, hustling for quarters and bonding over pizza and friendly competition...man, those years were golden.

To this day I eschew competitive gaming-- I'd rather work towards a co-operative goal or PvE with friends/my kids than have it rubbed in my face constantly that the world is full of people who are more exceptional than me.

> Because you won't care, you'll just make the thing for your enjoyment.

bingo. that is the lesson to be learned. it's all about the journey, not the destination. it really matters zero if you actually ship or release any side projects. all that really matters is the enjoyment working on it.

i was just thinking this morning that the eventual legacy of the US just might be the understanding that exceptionalism is largely a myth. the US has been this great experiement in individualism (among many other things), and while the country has had a great run, we're learning over and over again that we individuals stand on the shoulders of giants (of our own making), that our accomplishments are a peculiarity of both our own efforts as well as those of hundreds if not thousands of other people.

it's great to celebrate our accomplishments, but attributing those accomplishments to a single person--as tidy and satisfying as that might be--is simply incorrect (e.g., steve jobs, bill gates, elon musk, etc.).

I've noticed that the "ordinary" things in life like getting married, or the birth of your first child are exceptional when they happen to you.

Here is a side project for 2018 for you: Be nicer to other people.

I have mixed feelings about this kind of articles.

On the one hand is inspiring to see what other can achieve.

On the other hand, I feel like I am getting trapped in a culture where if you aren't working on 30 side projects outside work, you are a lazy ass that won't be successful.

I make little open source web games as hobby and side project. I never made a dime out of them, and nobody gave a damn anyway. I have put way too much time and effort on these projects and I don't feel like the satisfaction I got out of them has paid off.

I have been working on a single bigger game for over 2 years now and I have seen a cycle repeat: I get very excited, I work really hard and make lots of progress, I get burnt out and I leave it for weeks/months. Right now I'm on my third burnout cycle. It feels nice to have free time again. Time to watch movies, play games, hang out with people or just go out for a walk for no reason. But I can't help to feel guilty because I am not working on my side projects. I have also promised myself that if I ever manage to complete this game, I won't engage on a large scale side project again, and chances are I will leave games completely.

So it may only be me but besides this kind of articles I would like to read articles about people who have no side projects, and that is also ok.

EDIT: Here you can find my current project, it's a sciency idle game so not everyone's cup of tea. Play at your own risk!

https://github.com/angarg12/nucleogenesis

Like you I have a handful of these I [push to github](https://github.com/PeteW).

Like you I dont tout them publically ([well except one time](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13271522 )) because:

1. I take my full-time job as a very serious obligation requiring good honest work every single day. If I felt like I couldnt offer my full-time job this sort of honest commitment then I'd immediately search for a better full-time job.

2. I dont have kids but I do have a life away from the laptop. Balancing full-time job and real-life means my side projects normally lack enough polish for me to consider them deliverable/sellable products.

3. Heralding all my side projects in public feels like busy work to me. If you were really interested these projects then youll search for the project first not the author.

Ah well now I just caught myself rambling on HN yet again. To each his own I suppose ;)

EDIT: I suck at links

Obsessively shipping multiple side projects is the IT version of Crossfit.

That is brilliant. Plus, sometimes these open source projects are just a script that does something useful. Side projects rarely scale linearly.

You should ask yourself why you're making these open source web games and bigger games.

Is it to learn the tech stack for some bigger goal, or are you doing it in hopes you gain recognition? Do you enjoy doing it?

That's a really important distinction to make because think about it like this:

Let's say you could do anything you want in the world. No limits here. You have enough money, time, health, everything. Would you purposely avoid doing it to mess around all day?

Keep in mind, I'm guilty of this too so I'm not talking down to you. I know the drill here. You goto bed thinking "tomorrow will be amazing" and then tomorrow ends up being 14 hours of reddit, HN, Youtube, games, some exercise and about 1 hour of productive work if you're lucky.

I've gotten a little better over the years, mainly from reading some books, setting goals, creating habits and working on things that I really care about.

You might get a lot out of some of the books I mentioned in my yearly round up post at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/2017-recap-books-read-podcast....

People say finishing a project is hard, but giving up on a project can be just as though if not harder! What is so hard about giving up ? It's human bias that we have somehow failed. The trick is not to look at it like a failure. Think about how much you have learned! And the hours you have already put in should be considered "sunk cost" (micro economics) and you should weight the "opportunity cost" eg. how much you value the time you can spend on other things.

I'm in the same boat, and I have made the mistake of writing my own engine, you get no quick satisfaction versus the time you spent, it requires a lot of background knowledge, and some functionality needs too much work to be a Hobby (and the fact that coding at home is not fun when you spent 9 hours coding at work)

It sounds like a cool game, on paper. But listen, you can't have both (1) a desire for the game to become popular (which, even if you say you don't, is implicit in your behaviour since the reason you seem to be burned out is because you're not getting the social reward that you expected in return for your time investment), (2) an understanding that you're building a very niche game that not everyone will like.

If a startup works towards a great vision with only so-so execution, what would they do? They wouldn't (if they are wise) stubbornly keep working on what users have already told them (reviews in your case) isn't really what they want. They would, in a big or small way, pivot. They would change and iterate and get user feedback until they hit upon something the users liked, not something they, the developers, wanted to code. If you don't adapt to that reality, you might still have a fun time coding, but burnout will ensue once you realize that the hidden motivation (people actually playing the game) isn't being satisfied to the extent you wished it was.

My advice is to get some (one or two weekend sized) core mechanics really really fun and solid, try it out on actual people, and change it up if they don't like it, and go from there. Don't build a big gigantic thing before you know if you're on the right path or not.

I already did that. v1 was a short-ish prototype to play around with an idea. v2 is the fully realised vision. As a matter of fact the game is feature completed (save from minor features), and it just needs balance, polish (oh boy, does it need polish) and better UX.

I'm aware that my audience is niche, if only I was appealing to them!. At the end the looming feeling is whether any amount of balance/polish is going to make it appealing, or should I consider it a lost cause for good.

Your heart doesn't seem to be in it. Don't fall for sunk-cost. Cut your losses and go for something where polish and quick iteration is the highest priority (removing all fluff like configuration files and clean and structured code). Take inspiration from Notch's live coding sessions. Try to make each version essentially "finished", without large set of "boring grunt work" weighing your motivation down (like polish is weighing you down now). Don't stop iterating on the basics until you and a few friends (online or offline) really love playing with it. Focus on pure childish joy, and be brutally honest with yourself if you don't feel it. Don't hide away for months without getting user feedback. On the bright side, now you have a chance to learn from your mistakes! Good luck!

Personally I stopped working on "projects" a couple of years ago after I had to abandon a mildly popular (that's probably a bit of a stretch) project. Nowadays most of the programming I do outside of work is either learn new things or tackle challenges that I find interesting (often using the new things that I learnt).

Same for me, the problem i have is that after a while you are no longer implementing new game mechanics or novell features- you are basically doing maintenance - so personally im no longer impressed by those dessert flower projects. Anyone can do the fun work, but sticking around and beeing a maintainer.

Respect to that.

I used to have a lot of consternation for not having a side project. Then I realized that most of the side projects I saw people pushing seemed like solutions in search of problems to me.

Overall - it’s a mindset thing for me. I think we have overly complex software systems in place to solve problems that would be better served by people learning to communicate effectively with each other. Along that same line, I think we sell people on the idea they need these newer/faster/better software systems to be efficient or effective when in reality, not much has changed since the 80s in word processing.

That’s a long way to say that my hobby is not shitting up the world with more code. Instead I’ll just spend time with my animals and people.

> and nobody gave a damn anyway

Have you ever linked them anywhere? I'd have thought this comment was a good place

> it may only be me but besides this kind of articles I would like to read articles about people who have no side projects

Probably, that sounds like a boring read

Yes, I'm active in Reddit and I posted them there.

I also released one in Kongregate, where it got bad rating and terrible feedback.

Here you can find my current project, it's a sciency idle game so not everyone's cup of tea.

https://github.com/angarg12/nucleogenesis

Why such backlash from people that don't want to build any side projects? Doesn't go without saying that if you don't want to build a side project you don't have to?

I was expecting to read comments here about people that are interested in how to ship side projects. Instead, I mostly see people with the urge to be vocal about how they don't want to ship any side project.

I assume this is a reaction from some societal pressure for developers to always be building side projects. I wasn't aware that there was such pressure. But if so, by whom?

EDIT: Contrast with this other HN thread: "How to Write Articles and Essays Quickly and Expertly": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16005460

Not a single comment about how people do not want to and do not care to write essays and how they have much better use for their time. I think that is the norm for "How to..." threads in HN. People who don't care about it, just don't care about it. Don't even bother to comment why they don't care, probably not even click on it. Why is it different with side projects?

There has been growing pressure in the developer community to have side projects as a way to prove your worth.

People take a dim view of developers who don’t do anything outside of work. If you’re not coding something in your off hours and keeping a portfolio of successful projects it must mean you are not passionate enough, or smart enough, or ambitious enough. And they take the opinion that that is not the kind of developer companies should hire, nor that they want to associate with.

Side projects thus become a sort of humble brag, instead of a project built out of genuine interest. Many developers are building things they don’t seem to give a shit about beyond how it will help their career prospects.

These notions need to end.

Can you explain why you think that these notions should end for people, let alone from the perspective of a company? I'd fully agree that living to work is undesirable, but in this case I don't think that notion applies since development opens an infinite number of doors to anybody with the ambition and skill to make it work for them.

It does not open an infinite amount of doors, these days it merely prevents doors from closing.

If your life is disrupted because you find yourself having to ship and maintain side projects just to get a job or be considered a good developer, then ask yourself, are you writing code or is code writing you?

> then ask yourself, are you writing code or is code writing you?

Lol what?

>>People take a dim view of developers who don’t do anything outside of work.

To me it depends on the developer's level of experience. For more junior developers, I definitely prefer those who drink from the proverbial fire hose and try to expand their professional knowledge outside of work.

I was wondering the same after reading the top comment by teekert, which came across as somewhat defensive (and not to mention off-topic) to me. I can see it being a result of (tacit?) societal pressure. Perhaps a "you are not good enough if you are not working on side projects" programmer anxiety, which leads to highlighting say one's parental accomplishments in order to compensate for that perceived inferiority.

We are all different in regards to our hobbies. Some enjoy raising children, some enjoy travelling, and some enjoy working on side projects. Can't we just co-exist in peace?

I'd hazard a guess - perhaps people feel a cultural pressure in tech circles in a way that doesn't apply to writing essays. Reading HN can make you feel like wantrepreneur sometimes reading about interesting things other people shipped, and the title of that article may have struck a chord as being a bit accusatory.

Also I noticed the language this author used was "How I..." instead of "How to...", which makes it more personal. Although folks on this blog are rational and calm most of the time, even subtle wording can trigger one's ego and make it hard to contain instinctive primitive fight-or-flight instincts that can override rational thoughts.

Maybe it's Blue Monday. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Monday_(date)

There is more than one path to becoming your best self, and your best self isn't how everyone else should be, and vice versa.

Side projects may be more glamourized and relatable on this site than say, writing.

Side projects, hobbies, and how we choose to value our time should not be confused with product and business building - in our 20's we collect a lot of experience at random things because we don't know what we're fully doing yet.

Building side projects is OK - just for the sake of building them or learning something new, because we can afford to do in in time or money. Many big and grand outcomes often start as small and relevant solutions.

The other thing that happens through our 20's is we become less of a follower looking to what others are doing and more self-directed as we head into your 30's.

There's a simple answer to "Everyone's doing a side project? Why do I suck?" It doesn't matter.

Becoming well rounded means organically finding new interests and priorities (including love, family, kids, hobbies) and in some cases becoming more well rounded for the type of future you may want.

> I assume this is a reaction from some societal pressure for developers to always be building side projects.

It's a distaste for doing "work" outside of work, in general, but also looking like you enjoy it that type of thing. There are definitely times/fads/seasons where having a side project is a type of social asset. I usually call that "looking for a new job" season.

Also, it's sometimes en vogue to do nothing work-related with your free time and show everyone you can afford to do so.

"You need a public deadline for sharing your work"

This is a deeply contentious claim, and definitely varies by person and personality. The dominant opinion currently is that publicly announcing and sharing goals undermines motivations because it puts the reward before the work, and it can handcuff and lead to a spiral of failures. We put too much stock in our intentions, and not enough in our actions.

To speak to the reward thing, people often announce big plans up front because they want to receive accolades/respect for what they plan to do, often claiming that it's the motivation. Whether it's donating time, going on a diet, a new exercise regimen, or that new game or novel idea, it is a success death-knell when it is announced at the outset. And then the speaker, who has already demonstrated a need for affirmation, is in a situation where the best they can do is not disappoint. Their failure is blamed on the lack of perpetual accolades for what they haven't done yet.

For most people, private commitments to yourself, and then a feedback loop with constant self analysis, is the real route to success, seeking accolades only on the results or actions of those private commitments.

In my experience people that talk about what they're working on don't finish anything. Come back a year later and they'll have some new grandiose project and a handful of excuses for why the last thing didn't pan out. I have a personal rule that I take very seriously, which is: don't tell; show. People will write you off as a flake and a blowhard if you are always talking about what you're working on. (I learned this lesson the hard way :)

Well it worked for me. I released an indie game title this year while my github is full of half finished old projects. Pretty much only thing I did differently was a public deadline and a few people that supported me to finish it on it (more like nagging tbh :))

I am sure this is not for everyone but I agree with OP about being public. Otherwise you just find a thousand excuses to not to finish anything

In order to finish something it has to feel somewhat acute, eg it shouln't be easy to postpone it forever. This doesn't contradict your advice on private commitment though. Public announcement can be a motivation "hack" to make it feel more important.

For this you need internal goals, ideally with honest self reflection and continual assessment.

Everyone is different, and there are those people who truly get the motivation by announcing intentions and then try to stick to their word. Research has shown that this isn't true for most, however: Most people sabotage their own success by announcing in advance.

If you don't have the internal motivations, external motivations are unlikely to have any beneficial impact, but are likely to have a detrimental effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implementation_intention

When it comes to internal vs external motivation they work equally well! An example of external motivation is money. It's healthy to have internal motivation, eg you like what you are doing, but it's not needed. It works best to have both internal and external motivation, for example really enjoying the work and get paid a lot for it, then you'll be very motivated, and wont have any problems to get to work.

I don't understand the point of the whole "shipping" fetish and the "maker" culture that goes with it. Even when I'm probably considered part of it!

Specifically the focus on the quantity of shipping, not so much the quality. I'm afraid it might set a weird example for new comers. And the use of the word "shipping" also has changed quite a bit over the last two years. You used to ship a release. That is what I would call "shipping", but now people are updating texts and tweeting and moving a picture 3px and call that "shipping". The OP luckily doesn't fall into that trap.

I'm probably too old/jaded/cynical or just not the target audience. I'll write the "I shipped one thing in three year" blog post...

I would say that the healthy version of why is summed up fairly well by an apocryphal story from the "Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking" - https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality...

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

The quantity group clearly lacked people who understood the grading scale. They should have just delivered big lumps of clay, possibly with a small indentation somewhere, and called them pots.

Reminds me of the old joke about the Soviet nail factory: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22375/did-a-sov...

It's probably about avoiding the cycle where you polish something for two years in obscurity, only to find that nobody wants it, then repeat.

We need more posts about how every side project during which you learn new ways to work, new technologies, etc., no matter if you launch them or not, are valuable to you as an engineer.

I get where you are coming from, but that road without at least some reflection just leads to burnout and depression.

If no one else sees it, I'm not sure if you're learning.

Maybe it doesn't have to ship, but at least SOMEONE has to see it (colleagues, friends, whatever)

Yes, I get that and it's a trap many people probably fall into. But why is this such a movement now? It seems common sense to me. I could be completely wrong though...

Which movement are you referring to?

This quality vs quantity thing is why it's hard to find any bug free node.js package on GitHub. Every time I hit obvious bugs that will never get fixed because the owner has moved on to shipping more projects. In my view, shipping a project that only works at 95% is like shipping nothing, because the value and hard work is in this last 5%.

Fork it, fix it, then ship it.

Open source developers don't have an obligation to provide free support for the rest of their lives.

But if the code is easily viewable, then that's a perfect opportunity to either:

1) build upon it, or

2) pay someone else to build upon it for you

Option #2 would still be faster and cheaper than recreating the whole implementation from scratch.

The problem is that most open source projects solve the easy part, and skip the hard part.

When someone else comes along and sees that, they say, why should I fix this thing when I can just as well start a new project that just does what I need?

That‘s why you end up with dozens of half assed solutions to your problem on Github, but in the end you‘ll have to write it yourself anyway.

My approach has been to keep everything as modular as possible, to create wrappers around major packages, so that I can switch to a different package once a major bug is found.

Unfortunately fixing unmaintained open source packages is often a waste of time since your improvements won't be merged to upstream (since the owner is gone), and it's unlikely that your fork will take off. Even if the owner add contributors to the repo, the changes still won't make it to npm.

Maybe for very large projects it makes sense since then a group of multiple dev can start a fork, and it's more likely to get some traction.

Presumably there was a reason why you were searching for the package in the first place? A challenge that you were trying to overcome?

If there's no perfect solution that exists (which there never is)--and if bringing in someone else's partial implementation "as is" doesn't work--then the only other options available are to write 100% of the solution yourself or to write (100-x)% of the solution yourself.

Also, presumably, that you're not in the business to write library tools.

So unless the broken OSS package is written in complete greek, why wouldn't it be more efficient to use it as a template for your solution?

It mostly makes sense in the context of showcasing your work, be it for jobs or just because. Quality means basically nothing if you can't show it off, and obsessing over quality will prevent you from shipping.

Furthermore, who could ever be proud of a half finished project? If its cool enough to tell people about, you might as well finish a MVP.

Yup it's the finishing that is hard. I started a fun project before xmas just for kicks. But I've yet to fire up the editor and get back into the zone, and finish it. So like much of my code, it will sit around in a half finished state and that's not really that much use to anyone else. Not that in this example it really was for anyone else. I'm always impressed and enthusiastic when people ship an MVP, even if it does have a few warts - as it shows staying power!

yes.

I made like 100 such projects in my life and only "shipped" less than 10, still I wouldn't consider the rest failed. I learned much from it :)

Shipping probably stands for an "official" end of your project. Knowing that you concluded it in an useful state. That's the rewarding part, I guess.

Even if it just means that you upload it to github with a nice readme and maybe a logo.

These days "ship" is literally used as "change in production"

I was not expecting such "backlash" against this post. I am not a psychologist but it feels like there are a lot of people who would like to ship more side projects and/or work on things they are interested in (seems like the very essence of a site called HackerNews) but can't either because of real life responsibilities or excuses they are telling themselves.

Yea... my project for this year - don't get crazy, and depressed as my wife will pass away... For now this is the most interesting, and time consuming project in my life. And a funny thing: all the personal stuff that matters most is so stupidly treated when going with that publicly.

However when someone makes some, usually useless, stuff, he/she will be famous, and lots of people will write so many nice things.

And don't even try writing that you are depressed :) You will soon be blamed for everything, including voting on Trump. And the good people will have so many useful advices like "would you try not being depressed?".

So... 6 small projects in a year. Cool. Will that help some people live the next day? And during that year you could do so much good to others.

Sometimes I feel like living on another planet. I know, such posts here usually get so many negative points... I hope this will eat all my karma.

And have a nice 2018 year, but really find some meaningful projects.

You are living on another planet; people who write posts like these are very unlikely to be going through an experience like yours. I'm very sorry to hear about that, and I hope you don't let overachievers on HN make you feel bad about yourself.

I don't know how to respond to your comment. I'm sorry to hear about your wife. After I hit "reply", I'm going to turn this laptop off and go downstairs and give my wife a hug.

That's good :)

I am so sorry for the situation that you're in. Stay strong buddy. Don't feel inadequate for taking some you time. I don't know that you do but, man, some down time after a loss is so important. It'll drag it out so much longer if you don't just let yourself sit in it. Great luck to you, friend. I'm sorry for you both.

Thank you.

To anyone looking at these projects and feeling some sense of anxiety over the culture of trumpeting competence through crushing through side projects _along_ with work deliverables -- just stop for a second and take a closer look at all of these side projects. They're cute, but how many of them make serious recurring revenue?

I understand it's a comparison of apples and oranges, but I find the accomplishment of making a healthy, growing side business along with having a day job to be truly impressive and ultimately a lot more inspiring. I would rather have one side business that's at 10k MRR and growing rather than six toy projects launched that all work at a prototype level. Not to detract from the value of launching those -- that's great! These projects all have genuinely interesting product hypotheses. But, launching is just really not where 90% of the hard risk (and hard rewards) ends up being located, in my experience.

I've created dozens, and dozens of side projects over the years. The motivating factor for starting any of them, is the interest in learning a new technology. I then use what I've learned from that side project, to build upon another one, and so forth. Cumulatively, they strengthen any "real" projects that I've had interest in building. Piece by piece, I build knowledge on various aspects of what my ultimate goal is.

what's your net mrr from these projects

FWIW, every single thing that ended up becoming my main thing or made me serious money began as a pointless side project I did for the fun of it. (I've always been self employed though, so this style of work goes with the territory.)

While this is quite impressive and having been in the same boat myself once I have come to the conclusion that unless you're doing it as a hobby, creating and shipping product is like 30% of your job.

The rest 70% 100x more important job is marketing, which speaking as a small business owner, consists of SEO, email marketing, side project marketing, blogging, contenting marketing, etc. Those are the actual time consuming often boring things that determine your project's success.

Indeed, and this type of post is a very large part of the marketing this person is doing for their side projects. Front page of hackernews (as of now) will surely draw traffic to all the projects listed. The article is very lean on the "how" but very much about the "what" was done.

The 70% that you are referring to is the attempt to make a project into a product.

Not all projects are products, though.

TLDR: Motivate yourself with -

1. Pick idea personally interesting to you (seems self-evident)

2. Use time box (not a new idea, and mostly a known concept)

3. Use external accountability (also not a new idea, and mostly a known concept)

So, it's kind of a shallow piece not really introducing new information to me.

What I don't get is all the hate on HN--which is a sad state.

I get the perhaps accidentally inflammatory tone of the article, which is "you have enough time, what you need is motivation."

It can be offensive to people who are struggling with kids and literally have no more time, but really want to work on side projects ... to have some random dude on the internet say, "look man, all you need is just more motivation!"

Okay, I get that.

So for the Hackernoon editor: maybe less shallow and potentially presumptuous pieces that offends people with kids.

And for the people with kids or some life circumstance that prevents you from doing side projects but are extremely motivated: no need to be sarcastic about how difficult life is to raise a kid on Hacker News.

Good work. If this was important to you then good work. No idea why people are giving it a hard time. Not everyone should or should want to build a bunch of extra stuff. One job can Indeed be plenty. If you want to work on other stuff you should. If you would rather spend your time doing some thing else then do that.

The reason of the success is that he set a realistic goal that he could achieve within a month!

Setting goals is like making estimations. First make sure your goal can be achieved by you, now. eg something you can do right now and finish within a month. Then you cut the project goals in half. Now you got something realistic ;)

My side projects of 2017 were writing a blog post every week (got 50) and making video course.

Even made a few bucks with the course.

And dont forget to beat your own drum every month!

85% of this article is just a series of detailed advertisements for the projects he did...

Not: "How I Shipped Six Side Projects in 2017"

Good for him though.

I don’t know why but “Shipped” to me has a bad connotation.

Expediency vs. careful design. The former “Ships”, the latter develops.

Shipped is not necessarily good or bad... it just doesn't mean much by itself.

Of course. I was rather conveying what it meant to me - based on how it is used at work and in my general experience.

Oh, he mentions GOAP of the Fear Ai. I have an interest for it also and planning a project around it.

Awesome!

You have a fantastic gift for finding small useful projects. Truly fantastic.

Humble brag anyone?

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