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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.