It's OK to abandon your side-project
robbowen.digital
robbowen.digital
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.
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.
It's a risk worth taking. Opening the front page only to find my project there made me very happy and motivated. I couldn't believe my luck. Someone somehow independently discovered my project, posted it on HN, people were engaging with it and somehow I managed to not miss the small window of time where all this was happening.
If there's less things posted to /new at that particular time, it seems a bit more likely someone gets a chance to interact with it before it disappears from that first page of /new.
At least HN tolerates reposts if you don't get any attention the first time round [1]; if your launch bombs on ProductHunt, you don't get a second chance (ask me how I know!)
On gsky's about HN traffic lasting two days - that was definitely my experience, though if it's interesting enough it'll likely get picked up by other sites too. Blogs, podcasts etc are always picking stuff up from Reddit and HN.
My side-projects went from "constant failures" to "always a success" when I changed my success criteria to be "I learned something new and had fun". Granted, some see it as cheating, but if it improves my happiness, I'm fine with cheating a bit as long as it doesn't hurt others.
It's surprisingly controversial to recognize that the amount of happiness money gets you has diminishing returns, but empirically it's always seemed true to me. If you goal is to maximize happiness, trying to make money from some activities can make you _less_ happy. I guess I'm just not enough of a capitalist to see the value of money that doesn't make me any happier, but after having enough to be comfortable and secure enough about my ability to continue to be in the future, money stops being a motivator for me.
In my view, this is the only success criteria that counts for side projects. If your goal is to make money with a side project, that's not a side project, that's a startup.
It’s fun to go back to old projects and finish them with new skills you’ve acquired over the years.
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 :)
I've had a dedicated server from Hetzner for 28 EUR/month, with no bandwidth costs and no metering. I currently host 20+ static websites + a bunch of other services from this host now, with no issues and performance is fantastic. So ends up being less then 1EUR/month per "thing" run on that server, and I don't contribute to making the web more "Cloudflare-only".
However in the past 7 months I've been constantly being told at work that what I do isn't enough, without constructive feedback. Pretty much every single 1:1 is "you're not doing enough" and no action items, not enough compute to do what I should be doing, being left out of meetings, and no access to the data I need. Then the next meeting and another "you're not doing enough". Not one "what's blocking you" and "thanks for telling me, I'll get to work on helping you unblock that". It's so brain draining that coding is no longer fun and I've lost a lot of motivation to maintain things even outside of work.
In any case your priority should be to find a way to fix this before you burn out for good. Losing energy for your spare time is already a big deal. You are mentioning brain draining. 7 months is a long time. Your job should be supporting your life and what you want to spend your time on, not the other way around.
If you can maybe take holidays. A good break.
Good luck, you can do this.
It's complicated. For one, the culture is such that 1 out of N people need to be kicked out every year, by policy, even if all N people are doing great work. So people largely end up just clawing at each others' scope to try to not get kicked out, and stealing other peoples' work to be the first one to put their name on it. Yet others team up and protect each other, excluding other team members from meetings (which results inevitably in those team members being accused of not having done work). There is no real teamwork, nobody wants to be helped, everyone wants to be the hero so that they don't become the one that's kicked out.
Add on top of that forced RTO where if you don't badge into the office 3 times a week the system creates a ticket to your manager requiring them to explain to your skip why you weren't there. This system causes people to go to the office sick. I got COVID once and colds multiple times from the stupid RTO policy. When I was beaten up from COVID, in bed for several days, absolutely drained, unable to work, and informed my manager, the VP a few levels above me accused me of not contributing to a paper that some coworkers wrote that week, to which my manager did nothing to explain the circumstances. Meeting rooms are hard to get, and I often have to take meetings from storage closets, copy rooms, or my car in the office parking lot.
> Also, have you started looking for other jobs so you can run from this place as fast as you can?
Yes, I am doing this, thanks!
> If you can maybe take holidays. A good break.
Yeah, after taking no vacation days for a whole year (and not even having the desire to) I took 2 weeks off at the beginning of this year. Hopefully once I lock in an offer at a place with real teamwork I can take a longer break. Or maybe go funemployed for a while and take a 2nd shot at building a startup but I'm nervous about the current state of the economy.
I would invest time looking for new job.
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).
> 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-).
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.
Food for thought, that most "startup" gurus don't preach.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Mostly it's way to learn something new, tackle some hard problems and understand them to a certain depth.
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.
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-aband...
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!
>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.
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.
We've got this cool no-code AI feature live: 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?
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.
Personally I think it looks awful but everyone to their own tastes!
We understand, buddy, don't worry about it.