As an ADD person, one of my mantras is: If I actually finished my projects, I'd never get anything done.
I have a kind of FOMO when it comes to knowledge. If I run across a topic that could conceivably be useful to me or my family in some way, I HAVE to gain at least an entry-level understanding of it. And since the best way to learn is by doing, I basically start projects all the time. The feeling of going from zero knowledge in a certain area to much more than the average Joe in a short amount of time is exhilarating. But of course the learning curve flattens out and linear gains require exponential work. That's when I know my curiosity is satisfied and I have enough background now that I can always come back later for a deeper dive if I want or need to.
This is not to say I never finish ANY projects. But I need to be very selective about those because life is busy, I don't always take pleasure in the journey, and they always end up taking 10x more time than my most conservative estimates.
To you anyone reading this who can relate and is happy with their career: what do you do? I don't want to be a magpie developer [0] for the rest of my life. I feel that actual, focused specializations are more valuable now, especially in the ChatGPT era. You have a jack of all trades in your pocket, so why hire me?
I'm like you but a bit worse because I almost never finish projects unless there's money on the line. I'm finding that medications helps a lot with this, but if I take them late I can't sleep (even IR) so I can't rely on them every day (I struggle wih unrelated chronic pain that affects my sleep schedule, along with being a night owl).
I've taken so many career assessments and nearly all of them return fields that are completely unrealistic for me to pursue: game designer, musician, filmmaker, writer, journalist... Might as well tell me to become a youtuber, podcaster or NBA superstar.
Are you me?
There's been a couple articles about finishing projects posted in the last couple weeks[0][1] and in addition to this topic being incredibly interesting, it also seems pretty pervasive in the community.
A lot of people, myself included, tend to work well with external stimuli, e.g., other people. Especially when there aren't users of the product, there's no one you're really accountable for except yourself. When you start to have users, of course, that becomes different.
So, the question really becomes: how can I bake in accountability in the early stages of my project to see it through and finish?
My answer has been to build around others. A group of us meet weekly over the course of a 6-week period to chat about our project, progress, etc. with a "demo day" at the end where we're expected to show the final thing.[2] It's honestly really fun and we're about to start our third "cohort".
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41428705
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41293219
[2] https://lmt2.com
This is real neat.
I see you ask about timezone in the form, but it would be great to address expectations around timezone in ‘questions you may have’.
Yes! This cohort we are actually splitting into 2 times so that everyone can join at a time that's convenient (had some people that needed to join very early before and want to avoid that this time)
When’s the next cohort? It doesn’t seem to say on the page.
Actually just nailed down the date to Oct 6th!
> Personally, I like to put a single song on repeat for hours and hours, days even. It helps me zone in.
I'm pretty sure this is a form of torture. It would be for me, at least.
I think this advice is okay, as long as you've defined parameters for what "finished" even means. If your goal is to make an app, publish it to app stores, and maintain it in perpetuity as a personal income stream, then great. Go for it.
Bringing a piece of software to production is almost never my goal with a side project. Usually, my goal is to explore a new concept. Maybe I want to get a feel for how "problem X" may be solved in the real world, whether or not my program is one of those real-world solutions. Maybe I'm revisiting an old project with new wisdom.
Take this for example: I have created no fewer than 4 visual novel engines, none of which are production-ready. A couple years separate each one, and all of them are wildly different under the hood. One of them is made entirely out of Nim macros. Another one uses Nim to do the drawing, animation, "game-enginey" stuff, but embeds the entire Ruby MRI with a custom DSL that the developer uses to write their game code. Another one is built on pixi.js, and the first one was just an enormous abstraction on top of ren'py.
All of these approaches are wildly different. All of them taught me new software design principles. None of them needed to be "finished" in order to do that.
The goal of side projects doesn't have to be "publish a production version" or "turn a profit." Cut it out with that hustle culture nonsense. Go make art.
Ha, I came to post that I am 100% with him on listening to single songs on repeat. I do that (or sometimes albums) often. Certain songs just have a particular feeling that is distinctive and exactly what I want in a moment. Even other songs by the same artist often don't quite capture the essence that I'm feeling.
Just saw the “Move fast and abandon things” thread and now this, which is it ?!
nah jk, cool articles
Do you want to finish it or do you want to start something else? lol
but yea, I agree, which to do. My random take would be do the opposite of what you normally do... my scientific expertise on this, I've started ~100 projects in the last year, and mostly "finished" 3...
My thoughts exactly lol
Some rouge AI agent is playing good cop bad cop on HN userbase
not to be horrible or picking on you, but it is "rogue". i would have thought that most people here would have come across games featuring a "rogue 5hp hit, 8 sneak" character to be able to spell this right, but almost everyone does it wrong. ok - picky, picky me.
It's a little much to say almost everyone does it wrong. More likely, since it's something that catches your notice, you probably have a bias for noticing/remembering when it's incorrect and not noticing when it's correct. It could also just be a simple typo or an autocorrect error for any given occasion
Yea, I’d say most people get it right. It’s not a misspelling that I see often.
Wait until they have to spell the name of the character stat that determines if they are strong or not.
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Man, this could have been written just for me! :)
I'm so guilty of abandoning projects in the past before they're even remotely done. It's mainly due to losing interest in the subject itself rather than dealing with the bugs and legacy and bad code decisions as you get further along the journey.
I used to get bent out of shape about it and criticize myself for it but I came to realise that it meant I didn't really have enough interest in the thing I was building in the first place.
Case in point (and a bit of a shameless plug tbh) just this morning I finished, end-to-end my current project I've been working on for 4 months: a .NET hosting site like tiiny host where you drag your zipped .net project onto the page and it gets automatically hosted with a unique url and whatnot.
For the last month or so, I've been at the really fiddly stage where all the moving parts came together and they all had bugs that had to be fixed both independently and together with other bugs and finally it worked this morning (still to polish it though).
I usually don't get to that stage and have abandoned a great many things over the years but this project has captivated me from the start with only a minor loss in productivity (due to a health issue with a family member tbh).
I'm now at the fear stage the author mentions - will anyone want to use it? We'll soon find out!
The long and short is that I discovered that I abandoned things frequently in the past but I realise I just wasn't that into the ideas! I don't worry about it as much now.
But, great article :)
You mentioned tiny hosting; I recommend trying https://static.app/ as they offer unlimited traffic, which could benefit your projects as they grow.
Here's a link to the previous posting of this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36313671 (235 comments)
Coincidentally, there's another article offering a different take on the matter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41635583.
On a side note: the author said he'd explain "how finishing a project is different from solving the problem you set out to solve" but I didn't see an explanation in the text. Am I missing something?
I think I define Finish differently. My projects are commonly scratching an itch or building what could be a business/product (eg SaaS MVP). What I usually find is, scratching an itch is satisfying in it's own right. I don't need to publish it or seek further validation than seeing that I brought this thing to life or achieved the hairbrained hack I imagined. Likewise, usually when building an MVP, along the build process I realize that I actually have no interest in running/promoting/dedicating time to the actual operation of this theoretical business. If it already existed maybe I'd be a customer, but also maybe not. So while both of those things are technically unfinished, I took them as far as I wanted to. So to me, that's Finished.
Yeah, I spun up some projects specifically for resume enhancement/something to demo in an interview, and while they didn't end up as feature-complete or as clean as I'd hoped they were enough to score me a job I wanted.
So they accomplished their intended task, hence they are "finished" in that sense. I could keep enhancing them, but I'm now getting paid to apply those same skills to much cooler stuff 40 hours a week, so the itch is very well scratched.
Software projects are often of the type that are never finished (though there are counterexamples). You can finish milestones, but the content of milestones is rubbery. You can often just declare them done by shuffling planned content into the next milestone.
A software project is not finished before reaching its minimal viable functionality and first release. After that, all further changes are just small projects on top of that project. A big enough project can become its ow source of procrastination: you can avoid working on something difficult, in that project, by working on something easy instead, in that same project. You're still working on the project, so all is good!
I think a better piece of advice would be: Ship your projects, don't worry about finishing them.
I'm more likely to be bitten by the need to perfect than the lack of effort to finish. And I still often wait too long to ship and get crucial course-correcting feedback, wasting time on what I thought needed finishing.
See The Creative Act: A Way of Being - Rick Rubin
He has a couple chapters on finishing.
It is also the part of the creative process that he has modified most over his career. You can feel the tension in his very articulate exposition.
I'm a simple man. I see Aaron Francis, I upvote.
Which is probably not a good reason to upvote.
Yeah this is what I needed to finish everything cheers!
At least that beer is now completed :)
Now I need to finish getting more beers.