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.
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.
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.
I've been running my side project - free ecards that are wrong for every occasion - (https://wrongcards.com) for eighteen years. I felt like the internet needed something like that, back in 2008. Back then, it was a tribute to the 90s era of terrible, awful ecards websites, about which I had become oddly nostalgic. It was also semi-intentionally a terrible idea from a SEO perspective (ecause, like, search engines aren't going to help anyone find what is ostensibly WRONG for every occasion) and I built the entire thing out of spite towards what I thought of as the 'new web'.
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.
On your side-project it's also ok to ignore best engineering practice, reinvent the wheel because you feel like it or make decisions based on what seems most interesting even if it's not a 'good' decision.
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).
Abandoned doesn't have to be forever. As I got older I had a longer time horizon and more skill, and found I was picking up and finishing projects I'd laid aside decades earlier.
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.
Totally. It’s usually a lack of time, lack of energy, general ‘life getting in the way’, that leads me to drift away from a side-project.
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.
It's funny because he didn't actually abandon it: he finished it, and just found he didn't need it anymore. It's still there, it's still done, and still could be useful to someone (or perhaps himself, in the future, who knows).
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.
Yea and also with AI I treat throwaway side projects as a way to develop my stack more so that for the next project I can just point Claude to it and say use this as reference instead of having to really work hard on thinking about architecture and scalability for every project . Also helps that you can later use sites at least as a way to get a boost in domain ranking
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 have such a project I just can't shut down: https://myowndb.com/
I started it 20 years ago, with ruby on rails. I neglected it but then decided to rewrite it in F# and publish it as open source (https://gitlab.com/myowndb/myowndb).
There are very few users, some from many years ago, all non paying. None gave any feedback I asked during the rewrite.
I should have shut it down years ago, but I just can't take the step. I'm focused on another project now, but who knows, maybe I'll get back to it....
I always had a hard time with that and kept things running for too long as putting additional work into shutting something down when you already lost interest is a hard sell.
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.
This advice is sound only if you think of success as defined by SV-investor-echo-chamber standards.
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.
I used to think about abandoning ghidra-delinker-extension.
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.
Most of my side projects have functional core features that I use regularly but they aren't quite shippable.
Building a GUI for others unfamiliar with the internal logic is incredibly difficult and tedious.
It could definitely happen after a few years and yes I have already had cases where I had to trace the code again to understand them. It is still a major hassle though!
I occasionally build simple CLIs that are immediately intuitive but GUIs are just too much work.
I've slowly began to write about abandoned side-projects. It's actually incredible how much you end up re-picking back up.
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
What's loading during the "loading" time? The network tab in developer tools doesn't show any transfers taking place during that time. It finishes getting content then shows the loading thing for a bit, then shows the content
My view is that side projects are not meant to be finished at all. Ideally they shouldn’t be more than an outlet for scratching a creative itch, and like any creative project, if your main motivation shifts from a personal goal to something vapid like testing the market viability of an idea that’s costing you a lot of time and effort to begin with then you’re going about it the wrong way.
If it's an open source project that has been used by others, please consider giving out maintainer access to others (now or later).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
It's OK to abandon your side-project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39500386 - Feb 2024 (79 comments)
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
What also needs to be shipped quickly and numerously? Oh, I remember, unsolicited commercial email...
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.