ProgrammerHumor
cantResist
Discussion
After 15+ years of doing this I figured out (or successfully manipulated myself into believing) that this is actually perfectly fine.
As long as you keep challenging yourself in these new projects, be it to learn new tech, paradigms or concepts, it might not matter (possibly it's even better) if you don't force yourself to finish something you don't care about anymore.
Of course once you get complacent and just do the same thing you already know over and over again the value diminishes.
Be me, naively confident to start “pdf parsing into excel and calculate it” side project
Now I’m sitting here pondering , “Really, what is a table?”
How hard can it be to add drone controls to some cubes? Should be fun
I have 60 e more side projects (over ten years worth), guess how many are publication ready?
And then you start, but never finish, then onto the next project. It’s a vicious cycle
Queue the image of all the Buzz Lightyear clones on a wall
Jesus. I'm so glad I'm not alone in this dumb loops. I really thought was just a problem of mine.
while (true)
{
string idea = GetShinyNewIdea();
Console.WriteLine($"✨ Starting {idea}...");
StartProject(idea);
AbandonOldProjects();
Thread.Sleep(TimeSpan.FromDays(3));
Console.WriteLine("😩 Lost interest. Time for a new idea.");
}
A friend that's a musician told me he's got a bunch of hard drives full of old projects like this. Some are full songs and most are just small riffs that never amounted to anything.
I’ve finished every side project I ever started. They all fed into the same huge project 😭