What if your side-project has a side-project?

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.

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

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'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

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.

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.

Previously...

It's OK to abandon your side-project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39500386 - Feb 2024 (79 comments)

> hey they aren't shipping their side-projects as quickly or numerously as they would like

What also needs to be shipped quickly and numerously? Oh, I remember, unsolicited commercial email...

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.