Obviously you're not going to complete entire projects in two hours, so you cut scope, while ensuring some version of "the thing you want to do" is possible.
So for insane forms with dozens of fields, you start with one field.
Then you iterate.
The idea is that at any given point outside of those two hours, your project can be used. It doesn't do ALL the things, but just enough to be useful.
Did this approach work consistently, or were possibly other factors at play?
has been 4.5 years straight for this one project, doing two hours on workday mornings
Too many of my early projects sort of became a jumble of different aspirations, most of them unrelated to the core product idea behind the side project. I want to learn Elixir, I want to try Next Auth, I want to try Remix, I want to learn Haskell, I want to build my own Shopify, I want to -- and the list goes on. Being clear and honest with myself about what those things are makes the scope of a project more clear to me and I can make judgment calls this way on what stays or goes.
1. Spend less time on the internet - I spend 2 days of the week without internet access so I can finish my projects in peace
2. Use as little technology as possible to finish them. I find having a limited tool-set actually lets me think about the creative part instead of working with too many tools and being distracted learning more tools.
3. Don't become attached to projects. If it doesn't feel natural, discard it and work on a new one. I regularly finish projects, but I also have a large pile of discarded ones.
PaulHoule•1h ago
Right now my current "project" is building a stock of photos so that I can post a continuous stream of photos on social
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/photography
This is pretty consuming because my developing process is intensive. I took about 3500 photos of two basketball games on Jan 31 and picked out about 400 to develop in DxO, I chose one color grade for all of them because a lot of the girls had bad acne that I wanted to minimize, now I am cropping them and applying local microcontrast to the parts in focus (but not faces of athletes with acne) I expect this take a few evenings, then there are many more batches of photos to develop including other games as well as tranches of flowers and landscapes. I have probably 15k undeveloped photos where those came from.
Another stream of that work is building an autoposter which will make it easier to keep these coming, for a while I was posting to Mastodon + Bluesky but lately I am posting to Facebook and LinkedIn, want to add Instagram (hate the UI for uploading) and Threads and anything else I can. That's blocked by my work to finish my Python API for using Postgres as an arangodb-like document database which blocks a whole bunch of projects that both involve moving forward, like a general purpose trainer for text classification and getting YOShInOn (my RSS reader) off arangodb. Feels overwhelming at time but the train is moving.
pillefitz•1h ago
PaulHoule•1h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban
My RSS reader is ‘active” in the sense that I use it every day but I haven’t touched the code in months. I’ve been using Kanban control for side projects since maybe 3-4 years ago when I started doing side projects again. At the beginning of the year I had a lot of projects that were more programming heavy like I wrote a Python chess program that could beat my son that didn’t have time control, I did some work towards a Java chess program which would have had time control so we could take it to the chess club but my son quit going to chess club so I mothballed it.
The photo thing is converging towards transitioning from semi-pro to pro, figuring building my rep as a ‘social media photographer’ will get me work. I have other imaging projects in mind such as something to view stereograms with WebXR and something that can compose individual flowers to make ‘infinite flower fields’ that could be printed on fabrics but these are at the ‘pile of notes” phase waiting their turns.