The Developer’s Guide to Abandoning Side Projects

Every developer has a graveyard. Mine has a CHIP-8 emulator from a couple of years ago, half a college RPG written in C, a Gatsby portfolio (and a Next.js one, and a... you got it), some automation scripts that solved problems I no longer have, and a notebook full of side project ideas I will never start.

For a long time I treated this as a personal flaw. Lack of discipline, lack of focus, lack of something. Then I noticed that the developers I respect have graveyards too, sometimes bigger than mine. And the ones with the smallest graveyards were not the most productive ones, they were the most boring ones.

So the real question is not how to stop abandoning projects. It is knowing when abandoning is the correct move, and when it is just the easy one.

After enough years doing this, I noticed my abandonments fall...

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