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.

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embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I do kind of the opposite, every week every project needs to justify why I should keep doing it and what I learned recently, and if I can't come up with any good reasons or good learnings, I abandon it.

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keiferski 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That's a good idea too, but I think the wrap-up postmortem helps me clear my mind a bit. Personally I feel like having a formal declaration of "it's finished, for now at least" takes a weight off my mind.

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gilleain 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Also it can give a feeling that it was not a waste of time - lessons learned, what you would do next time on other projects, other avenues to look into.

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.

	▲	embedding-shape an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Also it can give a feeling that it was not a waste of time 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 :)

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szundi 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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