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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.

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.

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

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

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

me abandoning projects when progress is at 90%

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.

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).

> 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...

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

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

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.

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'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 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....

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.

Previously...

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

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.

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.

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.

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

No it's not OK