[keiferski]

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.

[embedding-shape]

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.

[keiferski]

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.

[gilleain]

Also it can give a feeling that it was not a waste of time - lessons learned, what you would do next time on other projects, other avenues to look into.

For years I wrote a technical blog intended just for my own reference, as the small effort required to write it up, create images and so on felt good. It was also a good point to think about what I had _actually_ done - sometimes this made me realise small mistakes or missing details.

[embedding-shape]

> Also it can give a feeling that it was not a waste of time

Another way to avoid that feeling is changing your mindset around what's "abandoned" vs "completed". "Completed" doesn't have to mean "published project and made it FOSS" or whatever, it could literally be "Scratched an itch to play around with library X's APIs" or something, or just "Wanted to see if it was possible".

Nowdays I "complete" every single of my side-projects, some of them in some hours, because "completed" no longer has to mean "it's public and people can use it", mentally this feels a lot better :)

[gilleain]

That's fair (and of course, as a personal project, set any goal you like! :) ) - but I wonder if that risks setting the bar too low, so that everything is 'completed'.

I think, we're in agreement : it's your project, so you get to say what 'completed' means, but my criteria is usually writing some small amount of text about it, even if that text is "this didn't work, ho-hum".

[mmarian]

Yep, I've done that a few times, eg https://developerwithacat.com/blog/052025/postmortem-company...

Quite cathartic. And I occasionally share it in some conversations to avoid repeating the story.

[djeasily]

that is a great idea. Unfortunately, I have never done that so far. But I do agree that it would certainly help your understanding and deepen your knowledge a bit when you do so for each project and write the core lessons and achievements down for each. One thing I am struggling in particular is to NOT start new (side)projects. Now that AI greatly facilitates coming up with new ideas and also CODING new software, it is just so enticing to start a new project every other day. In many cases, sticking with a few select projects might actually be the better choice. But it's really hard, isn't it.

[miladyincontrol]

I do appreciate an addendum no matter how short and brief, even just a message saying "thats probably all folks".