And if you’re like me, you probably wouldn’t finish the list either…

And you probably won't finish that too :)

Preach. Sign me up when you finish this side project, I will list mine there too :)

This is actually quite a good idea.

SideProjectCemerary ?

You upload your side projects’ data/github/seni-working-prototype, it performs a very quick ritualistic ceremony/blessing and buries it in a little marked grave.

Visitors are free to go grave robbing if they wish.

I like the idea. The cemetery could be a large scrollable top-down map where the user could click on each headstone to get a synopsis and a link to where it's hosted.

Would be cool to see what kind of side projects remain unfinished.

Maybe someone can make a curated wiki page of people's unfinished and/or abandoned projects so everyone can put theirs there? (Oh wait, that's just github.)

except you said curated :)

I actually love this part of github; it reminds me of the old internet, full of under construction Geocities pages and other half-baked projects. It's the polar opposite of today's bland, instagram-perfect same-same internet.

Yep. I love finding someone's old project on github and going through it and especially comparing it to stuff they did release and seeing how it was merely a stepping stone and a way for them to learn something. That significantly influenced how I code and helped me to be okay with writing code that never sees the light of day, as long as it helps me get past something in a project that does.

There are those “Awesome *” lists, such as “Awesome Python” or “Awesome Selfhosted”. Those are nice curated lists of repos on GitHub.

Good.

I don't see this as a bad thing. Most people make side projects for fun, trying knew things, solidifying knowledge, etc.

I mean, if you have a goal of starting a SaaS and you've spent years starting and stopping a bunch of projects that you never follow through on then yeah, you should improve on that. But that's not most people with a bunch of unfinished side projects.

Excellent point

I have - and still - struggle with this. My (unsolicited) advice:

1. just start anything NOW. Don't worry about getting organized or the correct order; just go. The act of working creates momentum; early on moving is more important than progress.

2. today's good enough > tomorrow's perfect. I found an OSS project for something I was going to build to help me capture "personal content". It's rough and not exactly what I was after but good enough. I've built (less than) half a system to help me with my job on top of PocketBase. Maybe someday I'll finish it (or even add another feature - #1 above has lots of ideas captured!) but until then I get value today.

3. Find something that has ongoing personal value: I help an animal rescue and pay the ongoing costs to run the system I built more than 10 years ago. Dropping $20/month to $5/month is possible but not a big enough motivation for a significant new version. The looming tech debt and support load might be over the rest of this year though!

4. Recognize that the incomplete part of side projects is a feature not a bug. Curiosity and exploration almost always end in specific dead ends, but the illumination gained can be used throughout your life. It's largely the act not the explicit output.

> just start anything NOW. Don't worry about getting organized or the correct order; just go

Yes! Projects develop organically, with many stop gap solutions and temporary scaffolds built and torn down along the way. Rome wasn't built in a day.

It sounds like the parent comment is saying they may benefit from NOT doing this. They say they have a million unfinished projects, but if you just GO without a plan, sometimes the momentum fatally wanes when you hit a point where you realized you've painted yourself into a corner.

I'm not saying a completely fleshed-out design document will help, but maybe a rough roadmap with milestone release dates would help keep the projects on track.

Meh, just change your personal definition of "finished" and everything gets easier :)

I too struggled with the feeling of not completing things, until I realized I didn't actually want to "finish" projects in the sense of "have paying users" but instead wanted to learn something new, try out some design/architecture or just solve a personal problem.

So for the last few years, my "finished" ratio is much higher, as I got the value I wanted out of almost every project I started.