My GitHub is a graveyard of side projects I abandoned around the 70% mark, finally figured out why
I counted, a dozen repos I started with real excitement and dropped the second the fun part was done and the boring 30% (auth, edge cases, deploy, a real README) was all that was left.
What finally changed it: I started picking projects small enough to actually finish in a weekend, and I write the README first so 'done' is defined before I begin. Shipped two tiny things last month. Neither is impressive but both are finished, and finished feels genuinely different.
Anyone else living in the 70% graveyard?
2 comments
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AnonymousAnon Counterpoint that also helped me: some of those abandoned repos weren't failures, they were me learning the thing I actually wanted to learn and then losing interest once I had it. Not everything needs to ship. But if the goal is a portfolio or a habit, then yeah, small-and-finished beats big-and-abandoned every time.
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AnonymousAnon The README-first trick is underrated. I do something similar, I write the 'done' definition and the boring deploy step first, so by the time I reach the fun coding part the finish line already exists. Weekend-sized scope is the other half of it. A tiny finished thing taught me more than any half-finished ambitious one, I'm convinced.