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.
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)
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?!
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.
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 :)
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".
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I especially appreciate the honesty about the upcoming pricing. Do you plan/want to make it a business?
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?
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.
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.
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
It's OK to abandon your side-project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39500386 - Feb 2024 (79 comments)
What also needs to be shipped quickly and numerously? Oh, I remember, unsolicited commercial email...
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.
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.
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.
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.