It's a fair point, but I often see all the ideas I abandoned and realize how some of them could have become profitable had I persisted and not lost motivation. Even a tiny setback (say, no response on Hacker News) was enough for me to stop working on the idea, and start working on something new. Of course, you learn a lot along the way, but to have a successful side-hustle you need to learn to sustain and channel the motivation.
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.
Is your motivation validation or learning? If it's learning, each day will be a win...even if your user metrics are trending downwards. If it's validation, your motivation will fluctuate with your traffic patterns.
Some projects are purely experimental, while some carry the hope that they can be monetized. My point is that I have a habit of abandoning hobbies, books, writing draft, and side-projects altogether thinking my motivation for them has been lost. I don't believe one should force themselves to finish things, but lost motivation is sometimes temporary or a sign of picking up not-so-good ideas. Realizing that and figuring out ways to sustain motivation is an important meta-skill.
I don't know what you mean by "validation" though. Do you just mean praise?
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.
> Even a tiny setback (say, no response on Hacker News) was enough for me to stop working on the idea, and start working on something new.
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.
And can get completely different response when posted at just the right/wrong time.
I've had posts I made that got no attention, just for someone else to post the same thing a few days/weeks later and it reached near the top, with hundreds of comments.
My go-to "trick" is to check /new beforehand. If the last post on the first page is posted under an hour ago, odds are whatever you post is gonna be burried very quickly afterwards.
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.
Interesting. I was wondering why my recent show HN posts were significantly less successful than a (imo not as good) post on a similar topic the day before.
My modestly successful Show HN for my last project [0] was the third time I'd submitted it - the first two got no traction at all. It does feel like luck of the draw sometimes, and it can be very demotivating.
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.
From your description it sounds like you're placing "making money" / "success" as your main motivation for these projects, which would explain why you're losing it so easily. Extrinsic motivations are very easy to lose, it sounds like you need to prioritise more intrinsic things such as having fun or learning something interesting. Check out intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation
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.
> 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.
> when I changed my success criteria to be "I learned something new and had fun".
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.
Total tangent, but I originally found Dark Souls too confusing and challenging and abandoned it. When I came back later for another try something clicked and it quickly became my favourite single player game of all time. It's funny how that works.
Had a similar experience with The Witcher 3. Tried to play it maybe 3-4 times, always abandoning it after one or two hours.
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 :)
Don't think you're Google and you have money to throw away... they only do that because they do have money to throw away, but they know that this kind of expense may, in very rare cases, pay off later as they find a market worth exploring further... you don't have that luxury. Indie developers offering free services which actually cost them money only makes sense if they have proven plans to "convert" most free users to a paid plan, otherwise you're literally donating services to your "users".
Is the cost mostly bandwidth? Cloudflare free tier is a godsend for static sites. I have a project which is audio-heavy and has used 2TB of bandwith since the start of January. It would have been about $180 of egress costs from S3, but routing it through the Cloudflare free tier CDN with an agressive caching policy has basically eliminated those costs.
Modern bandwidth charges is the most heinous modern scam against developers. Yes, great that Cloudflare has a free tier, but the cost of anything AWS shouldn't be the baseline, it's one of the more expensive options out there, especially their "premium" bandwidth.
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".
Thanks, I'll check out Hetzner. I'd been happy with NearlyFreeSpeech [0] until this project, who also don't charge for bandwidth, but for this project the audio files were orders of magnitude slower downloading from them than from S3 or Cloudflare. Maybe they throttle media downloads or something.
I have a couple Github repos with a lot of stars and a bunch of pull requests and issues. I used to work actively on them.
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.
Sounds horrible. Have you tried to ask what makes people think you are not doing enough? Also, have you started looking for other jobs so you can run from this place as fast as you can?
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.
> Have you tried to ask what makes people think you are not doing enough?
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.
This sounds more like high school than a workplace. You're really not at fault here. But I also understand how real life work can kill passion. It is why I went to pursue computer science instead of art. Don't let others take your joy away. It takes a long time to recover.
My guess is that your company is planning some kind of layoffs, manager received directions to identify XX% of low performers, and he is now building narrative.
If you're explaining case to English speakers, don't use sentence with "he" and "her" as examples of how English does not have case, and does not allow easy rearrangement. Because those pronouns are the one place in English where vestiges of case can be found, making it confusing.
It's pretty hard to come up with examples of how something does not exist. I don't know if the article has been revised since it was posted, but now it uses proper nouns instead of pronouns.
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).
I think using pronouns with cases like I / me / my as a contrast to other nouns like "dog" would convey the difference.
> 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-).
English sentences with pronouns can show that cases exist in English, rather than that they don't.
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.
Grit and perseverance are often talked about as critical qualities in building something successful but knowing when to quit and start over is equally as important.
Food for thought, that most "startup" gurus don't preach.
I thought it was the other way around nowadays, the 'lean' way?. Correct me if I am wrong, I thought founders are encouraged to pivot if can't find market fit early.
There’s a big difference between quitting a side project and giving up on a startup. With the startup, you have other people depending on you.
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.
Agreed, just went through this after spending a year and a half adding a bunch of cool real-time features to an app of mine that no one asked for.
Still a win because now I’ve “done it before” :)
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
> The tech stack would be simple too. At the time of planning, Svelte 3.0 was the new shiny so I decided to use it for my UI. I knew that I wanted to host everything on Netlify, so for the backend I'd write a couple serverless functions to present the questions and check the answers. The main list of nouns could be served from a static JSON file and, as I'd be the only user, I could safely persist previous quiz results and a high-score to local storage.
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.
I had a "successful" side project (specialized ERP system). Successful, in that I actually sold and supported a couple of copies. I tried to make thus into a full-time job.
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.
I had the same experience. When we think about being our own boss we think it just means that we can code whatever we want, when in reality it means we are responsible for _everything_, including things we don't want to do. I too realised then that I absolutely hate selling, marketing, and dealing with angry customers.
I’m at a point where my hobbyist time in college has translated into excellent product development at work. And now I just…don’t want to write code in my free time. That muscle is getting suitably flexed and I am using my non-work hours for numerous other fulfilling purposes. Maybe one day when I have an entrepreneurial idea worth pursuing I can hit the grindset, but right now is the moment for other things.
I'm stuck on this exact same problem. I want to code, but no longer want to do it for the sake of learning. I'll happily code for something that will get me true ROI, but haven't found what to dedicate my time to. I've realized I need to continue to learn, but that no longer applies specifically to the coding domain.
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.
> Out of all of my abandoned side-projects, this was the one that made me think differently. Even if I would never actually use the end 'deliverable', working on the project still indirectly achieved what I'd set out to do. That led me to an important realisation: we talk a lot about abandoned side-projects as "failed", but their success is really a matter of perspective.
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.
It's a fun post. I'm still -- after all these years -- a wannabe coder and I love it when a post about coding is something I can actually get through. Maybe someday I shall still grow up to be a real programmer and not just someone with a largely unused certificate in GIS who knows a little HTML and CSS.
> tech-interviewers will routinely measure candidates by the output of their extra-curricular coding
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!
Fear of sunk cost is why I only built developer tools so far. As a developer, I know what tool I need to build software quickly and effectively. But unfortunately just as I finished building my no-code/low-code platform, the dev tool market has become completely monopolized. All developers are focused on a tiny number of tools so now I'm forced to focus on a niche outside industry. Thankfully I can use my own no/low-code platform to build such apps very quickly so that's what I'll do.
Could you share the link to what you have built? Would love to take a look..
>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.
The dev tool market has always been completely monopolised. My own career started with Borland, then Microsoft took over. On Apple it was always objective C, and now Swift. Linux will jump every few years, as long as it's free.
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.
It is vital to understand how you can maintain your motivation on side projects. Of course it's ok but it should not become the question of your personal development at the end.
Not sure of tool/IDE but you can achieve that effect in HTML/CSS by use of text-shadow at 0px 0px and a reasonable value for the blur radius (maybe 5px or so).
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.
I had a similar experience writing a dictionary for Japanese person names based on usage frequency. In collecting the data I went from zero to being able to read the majority of names. I did end up making a frontend app for the data but I hardly ever use it.
I'll admit I've had a few times where a work crunch forced me to put down a few side-projects, and I've never had the motivation to pick them back up again. I still stash them on GH for memory's sake.
That always sounds easier than it is in reality as usually when you came to terms with abandoning your project you don't want to go back to it and spend time on making sure there's no secrets checked in or hardcoded somewhere. There's no embarrassing comments you want to have public etc.
I am now realizing an app I was working on had some "vulgar" function names in tests. they've been changed, but they're still there in version control. I just hope no one looks at the history of tests...
That’s hilarious :) The first time I worked on a project that used git, I got called out by a coworker for naming my branches after characters from Avatar, the Last Airbender.
This reminds me of the Dink Smallwood source code release. In addition to the author saying he was somewhat embarrassed with the quality of his code I remember the changelog included something like "Removed over 1500 instances of the word 'shit' from the code comments".
It's a fair point, but I often see all the ideas I abandoned and realize how some of them could have become profitable had I persisted and not lost motivation. Even a tiny setback (say, no response on Hacker News) was enough for me to stop working on the idea, and start working on something new. Of course, you learn a lot along the way, but to have a successful side-hustle you need to learn to sustain and channel the motivation.
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.
Is your motivation validation or learning? If it's learning, each day will be a win...even if your user metrics are trending downwards. If it's validation, your motivation will fluctuate with your traffic patterns.
Some projects are purely experimental, while some carry the hope that they can be monetized. My point is that I have a habit of abandoning hobbies, books, writing draft, and side-projects altogether thinking my motivation for them has been lost. I don't believe one should force themselves to finish things, but lost motivation is sometimes temporary or a sign of picking up not-so-good ideas. Realizing that and figuring out ways to sustain motivation is an important meta-skill.
I don't know what you mean by "validation" though. Do you just mean praise?
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.
> Even a tiny setback (say, no response on Hacker News) was enough for me to stop working on the idea, and start working on something new.
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.
Hacker news traffic lasts just 2 days.
And can get completely different response when posted at just the right/wrong time. I've had posts I made that got no attention, just for someone else to post the same thing a few days/weeks later and it reached near the top, with hundreds of comments.
My go-to "trick" is to check /new beforehand. If the last post on the first page is posted under an hour ago, odds are whatever you post is gonna be burried very quickly afterwards.
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.
Interesting. I was wondering why my recent show HN posts were significantly less successful than a (imo not as good) post on a similar topic the day before.
Is there some kind of graph of HN activity which shows the highs and lows? Sounds liie it would be wise to post during the lower traffic periods.
My modestly successful Show HN for my last project [0] was the third time I'd submitted it - the first two got no traction at all. It does feel like luck of the draw sometimes, and it can be very demotivating.
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.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38856999
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772114
That meta post is very helpful. I thought dang had to email you for the second chance slot.
From your description it sounds like you're placing "making money" / "success" as your main motivation for these projects, which would explain why you're losing it so easily. Extrinsic motivations are very easy to lose, it sounds like you need to prioritise more intrinsic things such as having fun or learning something interesting. Check out intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation
This!
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.
> 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.
> when I changed my success criteria to be "I learned something new and had fun".
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.
As long as you complete it, just keep it out there. You never know when your half-baked idea might result in a lead for something new.
It’s fun to go back to old projects and finish them with new skills you’ve acquired over the years.
It’s like returning to an early area in an RPG and discovering side quests and treasure chests you couldn’t reach before.
Found the Zhentarim hideout in Act 1 of Baldur’s Gate on my 4th playthrough
Total tangent, but I originally found Dark Souls too confusing and challenging and abandoned it. When I came back later for another try something clicked and it quickly became my favourite single player game of all time. It's funny how that works.
Had a similar experience with The Witcher 3. Tried to play it maybe 3-4 times, always abandoning it after one or two hours.
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 :)
good to keep this in mind while you're designing it. "will i be able to maintain this for 10+ years?"
The greatest measure of a side-project's success is whether it can be maintained after you move on
What if it becomes so popular it's costing hundreds of dollars to host. Asking for a friend...
That's called "a good problem to have". Seek monetization, funding, scale - popularity is a difficult thing to achieve in a world of infinite choice.
Don't think you're Google and you have money to throw away... they only do that because they do have money to throw away, but they know that this kind of expense may, in very rare cases, pay off later as they find a market worth exploring further... you don't have that luxury. Indie developers offering free services which actually cost them money only makes sense if they have proven plans to "convert" most free users to a paid plan, otherwise you're literally donating services to your "users".
Maybe your friend could ask for donations for hosting or find a relevant sponsor to sponsor hosting.
Is the cost mostly bandwidth? Cloudflare free tier is a godsend for static sites. I have a project which is audio-heavy and has used 2TB of bandwith since the start of January. It would have been about $180 of egress costs from S3, but routing it through the Cloudflare free tier CDN with an agressive caching policy has basically eliminated those costs.
Modern bandwidth charges is the most heinous modern scam against developers. Yes, great that Cloudflare has a free tier, but the cost of anything AWS shouldn't be the baseline, it's one of the more expensive options out there, especially their "premium" bandwidth.
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".
Thanks, I'll check out Hetzner. I'd been happy with NearlyFreeSpeech [0] until this project, who also don't charge for bandwidth, but for this project the audio files were orders of magnitude slower downloading from them than from S3 or Cloudflare. Maybe they throttle media downloads or something.
[0] https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/
You move it to a good but affordable host like Hetzner and call it a day.
I have a couple Github repos with a lot of stars and a bunch of pull requests and issues. I used to work actively on them.
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.
Sounds horrible. Have you tried to ask what makes people think you are not doing enough? Also, have you started looking for other jobs so you can run from this place as fast as you can?
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.
> Have you tried to ask what makes people think you are not doing enough?
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.
This sounds more like high school than a workplace. You're really not at fault here. But I also understand how real life work can kill passion. It is why I went to pursue computer science instead of art. Don't let others take your joy away. It takes a long time to recover.
My guess is that your company is planning some kind of layoffs, manager received directions to identify XX% of low performers, and he is now building narrative.
I would invest time looking for new job.
If you're explaining case to English speakers, don't use sentence with "he" and "her" as examples of how English does not have case, and does not allow easy rearrangement. Because those pronouns are the one place in English where vestiges of case can be found, making it confusing.
It's pretty hard to come up with examples of how something does not exist. I don't know if the article has been revised since it was posted, but now it uses proper nouns instead of pronouns.
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).
I think using pronouns with cases like I / me / my as a contrast to other nouns like "dog" would convey the difference.
> 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-).
English sentences with pronouns can show that cases exist in English, rather than that they don't.
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.
Grit and perseverance are often talked about as critical qualities in building something successful but knowing when to quit and start over is equally as important.
Food for thought, that most "startup" gurus don't preach.
I agree but it's probably much more common for people to quit too early.
I thought it was the other way around nowadays, the 'lean' way?. Correct me if I am wrong, I thought founders are encouraged to pivot if can't find market fit early.
Sunk cost fallacy is real.
There’s a big difference between quitting a side project and giving up on a startup. With the startup, you have other people depending on you.
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.
Great story of a successful failure.
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.
Agreed, just went through this after spending a year and a half adding a bunch of cool real-time features to an app of mine that no one asked for. Still a win because now I’ve “done it before” :)
I gave up on a side-project
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
> The tech stack would be simple too. At the time of planning, Svelte 3.0 was the new shiny so I decided to use it for my UI. I knew that I wanted to host everything on Netlify, so for the backend I'd write a couple serverless functions to present the questions and check the answers. The main list of nouns could be served from a static JSON file and, as I'd be the only user, I could safely persist previous quiz results and a high-score to local storage.
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.
I had a "successful" side project (specialized ERP system). Successful, in that I actually sold and supported a couple of copies. I tried to make thus into a full-time job.
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.
I had the same experience. When we think about being our own boss we think it just means that we can code whatever we want, when in reality it means we are responsible for _everything_, including things we don't want to do. I too realised then that I absolutely hate selling, marketing, and dealing with angry customers.
It took me a while to understand why I do side projects. Turns out that creating something big is never the answer.
Mostly it's way to learn something new, tackle some hard problems and understand them to a certain depth.
Is it okay to abandon my 500th side project?
I’m at a point where my hobbyist time in college has translated into excellent product development at work. And now I just…don’t want to write code in my free time. That muscle is getting suitably flexed and I am using my non-work hours for numerous other fulfilling purposes. Maybe one day when I have an entrepreneurial idea worth pursuing I can hit the grindset, but right now is the moment for other things.
I'm stuck on this exact same problem. I want to code, but no longer want to do it for the sake of learning. I'll happily code for something that will get me true ROI, but haven't found what to dedicate my time to. I've realized I need to continue to learn, but that no longer applies specifically to the coding domain.
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.
> Out of all of my abandoned side-projects, this was the one that made me think differently. Even if I would never actually use the end 'deliverable', working on the project still indirectly achieved what I'd set out to do. That led me to an important realisation: we talk a lot about abandoned side-projects as "failed", but their success is really a matter of perspective.
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...
It's a fun post. I'm still -- after all these years -- a wannabe coder and I love it when a post about coding is something I can actually get through. Maybe someday I shall still grow up to be a real programmer and not just someone with a largely unused certificate in GIS who knows a little HTML and CSS.
> tech-interviewers will routinely measure candidates by the output of their extra-curricular coding
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!
Don't be afraid to eschew technology when paper flash cards will do the job.
Fear of sunk cost is why I only built developer tools so far. As a developer, I know what tool I need to build software quickly and effectively. But unfortunately just as I finished building my no-code/low-code platform, the dev tool market has become completely monopolized. All developers are focused on a tiny number of tools so now I'm forced to focus on a niche outside industry. Thankfully I can use my own no/low-code platform to build such apps very quickly so that's what I'll do.
Could you share the link to what you have built? Would love to take a look..
>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.
The dev tool market has always been completely monopolised. My own career started with Borland, then Microsoft took over. On Apple it was always objective C, and now Swift. Linux will jump every few years, as long as it's free.
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.
I just read your thoughts, and hey, I've been there with ozma-io. We're now diving into AI and LLM stuff, and it's super exciting!
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?
It is vital to understand how you can maintain your motivation on side projects. Of course it's ok but it should not become the question of your personal development at the end.
How he made this font glowing? Which tool/IDE? https://robbowen.digital/assets/img/articles/lietvards-code....
Not sure of tool/IDE but you can achieve that effect in HTML/CSS by use of text-shadow at 0px 0px and a reasonable value for the blur radius (maybe 5px or so).
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.
It looks like the SynthWave '84 extension for VS Code: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=RobbOwen...
Personally I think it looks awful but everyone to their own tastes!
Pretty sure he's using "Synthwave '84': https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=RobbOwen...
I had a similar experience writing a dictionary for Japanese person names based on usage frequency. In collecting the data I went from zero to being able to read the majority of names. I did end up making a frontend app for the data but I hardly ever use it.
I'll admit I've had a few times where a work crunch forced me to put down a few side-projects, and I've never had the motivation to pick them back up again. I still stash them on GH for memory's sake.
No it's not, I put it on my Resume. Also it's a really good design.
If you abandon and don’t plan for anything in the future, please MIT open source it. Maybe someone else likes it. So many nice things just disappear…
That always sounds easier than it is in reality as usually when you came to terms with abandoning your project you don't want to go back to it and spend time on making sure there's no secrets checked in or hardcoded somewhere. There's no embarrassing comments you want to have public etc.
I am now realizing an app I was working on had some "vulgar" function names in tests. they've been changed, but they're still there in version control. I just hope no one looks at the history of tests...
That’s hilarious :) The first time I worked on a project that used git, I got called out by a coworker for naming my branches after characters from Avatar, the Last Airbender.
All the unexplainable buggy behaviors on Microsoft systems.
We understand, buddy, don't worry about it.
This reminds me of the Dink Smallwood source code release. In addition to the author saying he was somewhat embarrassed with the quality of his code I remember the changelog included something like "Removed over 1500 instances of the word 'shit' from the code comments".
my problem is I have more abandoned projects than successful ones :/ And not from lack of trying...
experiments....