It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024) | Hacker News Reader

It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)

robbowen.digital

188 pointshisamafahri93 comments

I've been running my side project - free ecards that are wrong for every occasion - (https://wrongcards.com) for eighteen years. I felt like the internet needed something like that, back in 2008. Back then, it was a tribute to the 90s era of terrible, awful ecards websites, about which I had become oddly nostalgic. It was also semi-intentionally a terrible idea from a SEO perspective (ecause, like, search engines aren't going to help anyone find what is ostensibly WRONG for every occasion) and I built the entire thing out of spite towards what I thought of as the 'new web'.

Now, almost 20 years later, I find I want to preserve something from the old days before it all looked like, well, gestures around wildly. It would be a relief not to maintain the site anymore. But I feel like I'd be disappointing a lot of people, as well. I have no idea how long I'm going to keep this going.

I just spent 15 minutes I don't have, browsing your site and chuckling.

Thank you! :-)

(PS. maybe just freeze it so it's up but don't spend / spend minimal time on maintenance, if that's possible?)

(PPS. maybe integrate with some of those "send a postcard" sites so that people can also send actual physical cards using your designs? or buy them (high-res PDF for printing)

Hey, that's lovely, and I'm glad.

I did simplify the ecard send/receive mechanism - there's been four or five different iterations of the app, and validating emails was nightmarish. As of a few months ago I just let people create and copy-paste 'links with messages', which has made my life considerably easier.

I did print 1000 boxes of postcards years ago - in about 2012, I think. they turned out looking really beautiful, in print. It's a funny story, actually, because I put them on Amazon and forgot all about them, entirely (I was working a full-time job at the time at a university). I still have a few hundred boxes left I've been giving away to people.

I've had a few people contact me in the interest of facilitating that service, but they seemed kinda slimey. I think you're right; I should probably set up print-on-demand. But again, side projects, huh?!

Maybe you could try to find somebody to take over or help you maintain it?

I've got friends who've helped, now and then. But all my friends are either too busy being successful in their career, or too fundamentally silly and unreliable. That said, I don't rule it out. It'd be a shame for the site to disappear off the web, forever.

Also, there's 701 cards. I have this mad idea I should get to at least 1000, before bowing out.

It's a good project. I had a look at a couple and they were very funny but I won't look at all of them anyway.

Just keep the site up sounds enough!

Maybe ask Hacker News if anyone wants to take over running it? — i.e. post the question on Ask HN.

I’ve had an idea for the last 15 years.

~10 bucks and a card is printed and mailed to address for you. Add a few bucks for a handwritten note.

I still think this is a good idea. I just had too many other failed ideas to put the time into it.

I'm aware of at least one business that does this already.

Which one?

https://www.handwrytten.com/

I guess it depends on your definition of "handwritten"; they're actually robotically written, so no actual human hands are involved.

I once used an "over the hill at 30" birthday card totally inappropriately, but much more funny... in the card it lambasted getting older and on the third page after the turn, "it could be worse, you could be turning 40"... giving that card to someone who was turning 40.

Definitely think there's more room to use inappropriate cards and even in inappropriate ways for more humor.

I like the idea of having an “end of life wrap-up" for half-finished side projects. Rather than just stopping and leaving them abandoned, you make something like a report on what you learned, what you built, and why you're stopping. Then it feels less like you've abandoned something outright.

I do kind of the opposite, every week every project needs to justify why I should keep doing it and what I learned recently, and if I can't come up with any good reasons or good learnings, I abandon it.

That's a good idea too, but I think the wrap-up postmortem helps me clear my mind a bit. Personally I feel like having a formal declaration of "it's finished, for now at least" takes a weight off my mind.

Also it can give a feeling that it was not a waste of time - lessons learned, what you would do next time on other projects, other avenues to look into.

For years I wrote a technical blog intended just for my own reference, as the small effort required to write it up, create images and so on felt good. It was also a good point to think about what I had _actually_ done - sometimes this made me realise small mistakes or missing details.

> Also it can give a feeling that it was not a waste of time

Another way to avoid that feeling is changing your mindset around what's "abandoned" vs "completed". "Completed" doesn't have to mean "published project and made it FOSS" or whatever, it could literally be "Scratched an itch to play around with library X's APIs" or something, or just "Wanted to see if it was possible".

Nowdays I "complete" every single of my side-projects, some of them in some hours, because "completed" no longer has to mean "it's public and people can use it", mentally this feels a lot better :)

That's fair (and of course, as a personal project, set any goal you like! :) ) - but I wonder if that risks setting the bar too low, so that everything is 'completed'.

I think, we're in agreement : it's your project, so you get to say what 'completed' means, but my criteria is usually writing some small amount of text about it, even if that text is "this didn't work, ho-hum".

that is a great idea. Unfortunately, I have never done that so far. But I do agree that it would certainly help your understanding and deepen your knowledge a bit when you do so for each project and write the core lessons and achievements down for each. One thing I am struggling in particular is to NOT start new (side)projects. Now that AI greatly facilitates coming up with new ideas and also CODING new software, it is just so enticing to start a new project every other day. In many cases, sticking with a few select projects might actually be the better choice. But it's really hard, isn't it.

Yep, I've done that a few times, eg https://developerwithacat.com/blog/052025/postmortem-company...

Quite cathartic. And I occasionally share it in some conversations to avoid repeating the story.

I do appreciate an addendum no matter how short and brief, even just a message saying "thats probably all folks".

On your side-project it's also ok to ignore best engineering practice, reinvent the wheel because you feel like it or make decisions based on what seems most interesting even if it's not a 'good' decision.

The critical thing is what the author says:

> always make sure that you're doing them for yourself, and for the right reasons

For me my side projects are generally something to have fun with and something to learn new things with. When you're finding it a slog or you feel like you've learnt what what you need to it's fine to just dump it.

Actually finishing something is of course nice and for beginners in particular there's a lot of value in going from that it's mostly there just some loose ends to tie off stage to the actually done stage but you don't have to always do this (or indeed just do it in some select cases).

On the contrary, my side projects tend to have the most strictest linter, test and CI suites. Why? You may ask.

I'll tell you. I forget stuff.

So when I pick up that Openweather tool after three years of not touching it to quickly change the output a bit, I can be pretty sure the overly robust scaffolding around the project won't let me break anything.

That's the beauty of side projects, you get to decide and you don't have to care about working with others.

Really yearning for crafted code that meets every one of your perfect coding style guide and preference with green checks across a huge set of static analysis tools and a large test suite, go for it!

Tired of conforming to your ultra strict style guide at work and code reviews that go in endless circles nit picking about use of spacing or whatever? Let loose and stop having to care/worry so much about the details.

> On your side-project it's also ok to ignore best engineering practice, reinvent the wheel because you feel like it or make decisions based on what seems most interesting even if it's not a 'good' decision.

Pro tip for enjoying your life at work: this also applies to you work projects. Once you realize this, you can have a lot more fun at work and even coerce work projects to be more like your for-fun/side projects. Of course this is detrimental to the company as a whole, but your company almost definitely does not care about you and you might as well extract as much enjoyment as possible.

If your coworkers are actually passionate about programming (i.e. not drones or PM brains running flowchart to increase quarterly profit), you can even make work more enjoyable for them.

Things like unconventional language choices, over-engineering of systems, unusual coding styles, obscure protocol/library use, and of course a ton of NIH can really spice up a mundane codebase.

Even stretching an "easy" module into a masterfully crafted program and going 4x over estimation can be fun sometimes (without any of the bad design choices suggested above).

Yes I stand by this bad advice, and it's allowed me to play with so much technology I would never otherwise touch at day job.

>> On your side-project it's also ok to ignore best engineering practice

> Pro tip for enjoying your life at work: this also applies to you work projects.

While this may be fun for you and your team, in my experience it makes maintenance more difficult for the next team that inherits the project.

If you're going to do this please consider if you'd find what you're passing on to be acceptable if instead you were inheriting it.

It might be more fun for you than your team, just saying

I will use this when I need to explain the Chaotic Neutral alignment to my D+D players in the future. Thanks!

> your company almost definitely does not care about you and you might as well extract as much enjoyment as possible

This is a very post-millenial attitude that explains in a nutshell a lot of the problems we have in society today.

>> that explains in a nutshell a lot of the problems we have in society

What evidence do you have for this?

I have worked with a lot of people who had this attitude. The main predictors for it in my experience are

1. Lack of faith in the company they work for, ie they don't fully "believe in the vision"

2. Love of tinkering and programming

I haven't noticed age factoring in at all. Working far far away from ant tech hub areas might be a factor as well.

Abandoned doesn't have to be forever. As I got older I had a longer time horizon and more skill, and found I was picking up and finishing projects I'd laid aside decades earlier.

Now when I put something aside I know there's a chance I might pick it up again in ten years. There wasn't much evidence of that when I was twenty-five.

It's been one of the best things for me about middle age.

Totally. It’s usually a lack of time, lack of energy, general ‘life getting in the way’, that leads me to drift away from a side-project.

These factors can always be reversed. And (whisper it) a bit of vibe-coding can also help unstick a project that ground to a halt because the next step was dull implementation rather than exciting creation.

Why in the world would you get downvoted for this?

Sometimes also the project is just 'done'. I many years ago made a windows screensaver (never released to anyone else). Just so I could have a '2001' screen saver. Basically in the background of the movie was all these screens flashing just weird status stuff. It was a cool aesthetic I kinda liked. Spent many weeks getting it to flash 'just right' and have the right animations for the right feel. Then LCD screens basically killed any need to have a screen saver. As basically instant on/off meant there was no reason to have the monitor running all the time. So the project was done.

As someone who feels stressed about not feeling able to finish the side projects I have (that is, working on my music player, learn Arabic, and learning to draw), this is a very refreshing take. Thank you for this.

Hobbyist gamedevs: I only have one project that isn't abandoned, and that's my next one.

I have such a project I just can't shut down: https://myowndb.com/ I started it 20 years ago, with ruby on rails. I neglected it but then decided to rewrite it in F# and publish it as open source (https://gitlab.com/myowndb/myowndb). There are very few users, some from many years ago, all non paying. None gave any feedback I asked during the rewrite. I should have shut it down years ago, but I just can't take the step. I'm focused on another project now, but who knows, maybe I'll get back to it....

Hey that looks pretty neat! I sort of miss MS Access sometimes, and this feels like it might fill the same niche. The star count also just went up 50% :-D

Does it use Sqlite or something on the backend, or is it all it's own? Do you know if it runs on Linux?

Edit: My answers based on a quick review (please correct if I'm wrong). It uses Postgres (cool!) and definitely runs on Linux (I see Dockerfile in there). UI is through the browser?

Backed by postgres, using the crosstab function. Developed and deployed on Linux Ui through the browser, built with https://websharper.com/

Thanks for the star!

Perfect website! Clear texts, clear screenshots, and an about page with a small photo of the person behind it. If I wasn't already using PHPMyAdmin I would definitely consider your product trustworthy. Am I right that it is - sort of - the same functionality as PHPMyAdmin?

I especially appreciate the honesty about the upcoming pricing. Do you plan/want to make it a business?

Thanks for the positive feedback! It combines administration features and end user interace. The definition of data structure is not very intuitive, and that would be the first and most important thing to fix. I think a lot of people get lost at the definition of their first table....

It's funny because he didn't actually abandon it: he finished it, and just found he didn't need it anymore. It's still there, it's still done, and still could be useful to someone (or perhaps himself, in the future, who knows).

I did find it to be a funny twist that, in the act of building the app, he taught himself the thing that the app was supposed to teach him when it was done.

Yea and also with AI I treat throwaway side projects as a way to develop my stack more so that for the next project I can just point Claude to it and say use this as reference instead of having to really work hard on thinking about architecture and scalability for every project . Also helps that you can later use sites at least as a way to get a boost in domain ranking

Here’s my own “graveyard” of projects just from the last few months: https://mesmer.tools/ that immediately got the highest domain ranking I have of all my sites(38), even ones making money

That's pretty neat. I actually had to spend some effort to upskill in Latvian to pass high school and college, so I would have found utility in this project in its more-or-less working state. Even today, if I were to come back to Latvia I'd be massively screwed over by a variety of grammatical cases of a language I effectively haven't used in years.

You never know when your abandoned side project is somebody else's treasure. I guess open source + let somebody vibe code to completion is the right way.

Don't stress out over these things. Some people garden. Some people collect stamps. Other people tinker with cars. And some people tinker with software. That's all a side project is. I make a point of going outside on a weekend and get some time away from my keyboard as well. There's nothing like a good break from coding to get some fresh inspiration and ideas.

If you are doing this for your own entertainment and learning, take it as far as pleases you. I have plenty of half finished things. I like picking one and doing some 'gardening' when I feel like it. Sometimes when I have low energy and I need to snap out of that, I just start doing simple stuff. Maybe I'll update dependencies on a project I haven't touched for ages. Or there's a bit of documentation that annoys me and I fix it. I'll see what needs doing, can use improving, etc.

There's a system to my madness where sometimes I find a use for disconnected bits of software in a business context. And sometimes that never happens and that's fine too. I abandon things as well. Mostly if I don't enjoy working on something, it just gets less and less of my attention. I have well over a hundred github projects at this point. Only a few of them have any traction at all. But once in a while I'll get a random issue report or PR on one that I haven't touched in years and that's all it takes for me to pick up where I left off.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,

Ultimately software (especially these days) beyond "hello world" is never really finished until it's abondoned.

Yes. And all software is abandoned sooner or later (usually sooner). Acknowledging that is reality is a healthy perspective.

Same pattern here. I'll get excited about an idea, dig deep into one specific feature, look at how existing OSS solves it, build a working prototype — and then hit a wall the moment it's time to add auth, roles, billing, all the "SaaS wrapper" work. Project gets abandoned.

But like the author, I've come around to seeing this as feature, not bug. My day job rarely includes the technologies or domains I want to explore, so side projects became my way of learning new stacks deeply. The funny thing is — abandoned or not, that exploration showed up on my CV. I've landed harder, more interesting roles specifically because I'd "played with" the stack on a never-shipped project.

The shipping isn't the point. The depth of the dive is.

What's loading during the "loading" time? The network tab in developer tools doesn't show any transfers taking place during that time. It finishes getting content then shows the loading thing for a bit, then shows the content

Previously...

It's OK to abandon your side-project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39500386 - Feb 2024 (79 comments)

Heck yes, it is. Time and effort are a great filter for bad ideas. If you couldn’t find a way to persevere it’s probably because it wasn’t that valuable to you.

Let it go, be free!

I agree, but still that little feeling of failure is painful.

I always had a hard time with that and kept things running for too long as putting additional work into shutting something down when you already lost interest is a hard sell.

Now I usually just add a static landing page, some screenshots how it looked like and turn of the backend (Example: https://getbirdfeeder.com) which makes me feel better about it.

Never throw anything away. I'm constantly amazed how often even very trivial little programs end up being useful again many years later.

My view is that side projects are not meant to be finished at all. Ideally they shouldn’t be more than an outlet for scratching a creative itch, and like any creative project, if your main motivation shifts from a personal goal to something vapid like testing the market viability of an idea that’s costing you a lot of time and effort to begin with then you’re going about it the wrong way.

Built a 4 startups and abandoned most every abandoned one thought me something I use today the graveyard is actually where my skills come from

2 days ago.. wasn't it 5? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47900220

I had a side project going off and on for YEARS. I thought it was a great business idea with some interesting technical challenges.

I asked Claude and ChatGPT about it, and they both shot the idea down as a viable startup. It was a liberating feeling honestly! I have since focused my efforts on other projects and have been more successful with those.

On the one hand this makes a lot of sense.

On the other hand I get oogy about humans deferring their passionate feelings in favor of cold machine logic.

I do that too. Wouldn't say it's relying on the logic. It's more hearing another perspective. Sometimes I think what it's saying makes sense, sometimes I don't.

It's the last 10% that's the hardest last 90%. Thankfully, with LLMs, it's much easier to push a project over the line to be "feature-complete".

This has been my experience, but most of it is still arduous work, if the goal is to push the limits and learn something new.

I am not talking about vibe-coding a throwaway prototype.

I would go one step further: everything is okay with your side project.

You don't want to open source it? Don't. You want to open source it but not build a community? Don't build a community. You don't even have to answer to requests.

You don't even have to disable the PR on your forge.

You don't even have to explain clearly in the README how you envision it and show any kind of commitment.

You do you, open sourcing is already nice.

The reverse being that as a user, if you use an open source project written by someone you don't pay, don't behave as if you were a customer.

This advice is sound only if you think of success as defined by SV-investor-echo-chamber standards.

Too many "tales of side-projects that grew into successful businesses" can narrow your understanding of what it actually means. I agree that it's OK to abandon a side project, but it is a much deeper reflection.

I've slowly began to write about abandoned side-projects. It's actually incredible how much you end up re-picking back up.

A gaussian splat converter that I made and abanonded became incredibly useful a few months later when I needed to do a visualisation for a really specific environment

I actually disagree and I hope others can help suggest some strategy for me to start finishing side projects. I haven’t finished anything that isn’t a university assignment so far. I always start something and end up putting it aside to work on exams or graded assignments.

Related, for some 2026-thinking:

Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47902525

While I understand that by making the quiz app the author had learned everything and had no use afterwards, it's unfortunate to see it not published. My friend is learning Latvian and it would be perfect for her!

Most of my side projects have functional core features that I use regularly but they aren't quite shippable. Building a GUI for others unfamiliar with the internal logic is incredibly difficult and tedious.

To be fair, these "others unfamiliar with the internal logic" can very well be yourself in six months.

It could definitely happen after a few years and yes I have already had cases where I had to trace the code again to understand them. It is still a major hassle though! I occasionally build simple CLIs that are immediately intuitive but GUIs are just too much work.

Shipping is overrated as a success metric in some cases. Some projects teach you everything they're going to teach you long before they're releasable. That's still a win i'd say :)

> hey they aren't shipping their side-projects as quickly or numerously as they would like

What also needs to be shipped quickly and numerously? Oh, I remember, unsolicited commercial email...

My side projects have landed me new real paying customers by giving me the skills in stacks on which I wasn't getting experience from existing customers.

Whenever I start a side-project now, I think through my expectations and set a timeframe to abandon it depending on how those expectations work out.

I used to think about abandoning ghidra-delinker-extension.

It was a project that started innocently enough, but its domain is unbelievably complex. Recovering MIPS relocation spots from a Ghidra database sounds like an easy enough task, until you're confronted with behemoth functions that span thousands of instructions and undocumented psABI extensions that produces edge cases from Hell.

But then, someone contributed a PoC COFF exporter to go along with the PoC x86 ISA analyzer and after that the Windows video game decompilation picked it up, spreading by word of mouth. I've spent a ridiculously long time fixing bugs and learning about MSVC on-the-fly (quipping "there are lies, damned lies and the Microsoft Portable Executable and Common Object File Format Specification." on the decomp.me Discord server at one point). Then other architectures started creeping up in PRs, first x86_64 and later PowerPC. It's a bottomless pit of toolchains and platforms minutiae that demand perfection to pull off and would drive anyone stark raving mad.

It was bad enough that I let it sit for months at a time, only for someone to message me and fall back into it, then discover it got even more popular while I was away. I also somehow got invited to present a poster about it at ACM CCS 2025 in Taiwan, an absolutely insane story (how many hobbyists are invited to present something at a world-class academic conference on cyber-security?) that while very enlightening also physically wiped me out.

Copilot saved this project and I really mean it. Preparing artifacts, writing tests, performing investigations and large-scale refactorings: hours of grueling, soul-crushing menial work that I no longer have to subject myself to. Features that looked impossible like generating debugging symbols became within reach. The ironclad regression test suite happened to provide the perfect feedback loop. I still review the code and design, but I no longer burn myself out on this madness.

Experience stays with you forever. Project (side-or not) has a lifecycle with sometimes sudden death.

Experience stays with you forever. Projects have a lifecycle - with death at the end.

its not ok. i do my project (and i dont want to share it here either) by myself for 20 years and i earned not enough to support myself but i still soldier on. keep going if what u are making is cool (at least to u).

Looking at my domain registry account its a wasteland of abandoned ideas

> "not always sunshine and Lambos"

This bit killed me. :-D

Yeah. Sometimes it’s about knowing when to quit.

What if your side-project has a side-project?

That's run of the mill project recursion applied to side projects. It wonder how much side project abandonment is due to it. Kudos to the author of TFA for not going and building a novel tech stack and actually learning the Latvian cases!

If it's an open source project that has been used by others, please consider giving out maintainer access to others (now or later).

It's sad, when projects are abandoned and a whole bunch of users would be willing to (partially) maintain it, but the key holder implicitly or explicitly decided that nobody else should have access.

Forks are not he same: It's very hard to get enough traction with existing users and the discoverability is terrible.

I feel uneasy about this after the xz story.

Kindly disagree. If I don't want to work on a project anymore, I also don't want to spend time finding a new maintainer, or just take the responsibility to endorse a random person on the internet.

A fork solves that. And potential maintainers willing to work together on a fork can open an issue and talk about it. The reality being that more often than not, people think that they are willing to keep maintaining it, but in practice they just won't.