[badloginagain]

FWIW I've found that there is a cross section between excitement of a new project and the momentum of that project.

Most projects fizz out when the excitement wears off before the amount of work you've already done on it has enough momentum to push you to do one more task.

When I push though that motivational hurdle, I find the amount of work already done incentives to continue on with it. The next task is obvious and relatively easy, because there is something to work with.

Now, losing confidence that everything you've written is garbage and refactoring the same systems over and over again until you give up- that's the hurdle I choke on :D

[tachyonbeam]

> Now, losing confidence that everything you've written is garbage and refactoring the same systems over and over again until you give up- that's the hurdle I choke on :D

My recommendation would be to pick a very small project and have specific goals for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Try to define a project you can complete in a week or two. Keep the list of specific features you want very short. Then, remember that the code doesn't have to be perfect, it only has to be good enough to implement those specific features you wanted. It doesn't have to handle epic amounts of traffic, etc. It's ok to cut some corners round as long as it does the job for what you're trying to achieve.

Otherwise, just as a general mindset, I try to remind myself that a lot can be done incrementally. Sometimes it's important just to build a working version of your software so you can try it out and learn some lessons by playing with the working software. If you stop and refactor endlessly in an attempt to try to build the perfect system, you'll never get to the point where you're actually trying a working version of your program... Which is the point where you realize what's really important or not to achieve what you want.

[arosier]

Agreed, I have found that as well. I have tried to define how much momentum I need to stay engaged. For instance, I started a YouTube channel. The process of creating videos was a short enough feedback loop (a few days max to start/finish a video) that I was able to stay engaged for longer than normal. I fed off of each finished video as the momentum to keep working on the project of "growing an audience around a topic I was passionate about".

I have also found that I am able to stay engaged in other applications where I have a shorter feedback loop, to maintain momentum.

[rchaud]

That's a great example. I experienced something similar with my side project, which was a music magazine app, similar in concept to the (failed) iPad interactive magazine projects that were all the rage back in 2012 or so.

It was very challenging to build something that scaled to phones and tablets while having a magazine-type aesthetic (compartmentalized information on each discrete page).

In the end, I abandoned it, and decided to create mini-zines and post them to Instagram as slideshows. Zero interactivity, but they're orders of magnitude faster to make, layout is constrained to IG's 1:1 aspect ratio and and I already have the artboards as I used Sketch to build my static mockups.

[tartoran]

I think you made a good saving of the initial investment and still managed to to publish your content which is mission accomplished. In fact you're likely to be consumed from IG.

I also tend to go to the path of least resistance and do things in batches and the simplest way possible but concentrate on the most important aspect of it, the content. In the end this is the winner solution for me, if I were to take the long road I would most likely stumble upon details that are not important. If they are important there's a possibility to fix one aspect or another.

[rchaud]

True, I was stumbling on details constantly. Page load times, optimizing for screen sizes (this was a no-scroll, pure swipe-based mag), and it was very discouraging.

And you're also right about IG, people actually saw it and it would come up if people searched the tags. As a passion project, that's 70% of what I wanted. That remaining 30% probably wouldn't have been worth the effort.