Coping strategies for the serial project hoarder

I write down every thought in the open so I have a log of what I thought. See my profile. Some go on to become projects.<p>If I want to do some feature work on the thought I create a GitHub issue and write implementation notes, I did this on samsquire&#x2F;hash-db for document storage.<p>I write English descriptions of the mental model then implement.<p>Some people say code is the documentation. This is unfortunate and means that thinking ends when the code is decommissioned its lineage ends and cross pollination never goes on.<p>The lifespan of an English description on Wikipedia of an algorithm or project description outlives its implementations.<p>Please document your mental model of the problem you&#x27;re solving.<p>As an analogy the documentation and thinking behind the implementation of Windows 95 (and it&#x27;s user interface design thinking and guidelines) is outlived by its documentation and screenshots.<p>University and research publications whitepapers outlive the code written during research and potentially many implementations.

&gt; This is the most important tip: avoid side projects with user accounts.<p>&gt; If you build something that people can sign into, that’s not a side-project, it’s an unpaid job. It’s a very big responsibility, avoid at all costs!<p>Interesting for sure. But what about those of us that hoard side <i>products</i>?

&gt; <i>The key trick is to ensure that every project has comprehensive documentation and automated tests. This scales my productivity horizontally, by freeing me up from needing to remember all of the details of all of the different projects I’m working on at the same time.</i><p>Good insights. Both great steps to being able to re-learn &amp; experiment (or maintain&#x2F;fix) quickly.

That was a gem of an article. I wish I had read something like that years ago.<p>Last year I started to break up Common Lisp code monoliths for personal projects into small libraries that are installable with Quicklisp, with applications also Quicklisp installable that are smaller by reusing libraries. I have started doing this to a lessor degree with my Python side projects and in the last week I set up a personal library system for my occasional Chez Scheme projects.<p>I bookmarked the author’s two templates for new Python library and command line tool projects.

I&#x27;m a compulsive project hoarder and they all build on top of each other. My first project was an open source full stack real-time framework I built about 10 years ago. I worked on it for about a year but it didn&#x27;t get any traction so I pulled out some of the core logic and turned it into a stand-alone real-time remote event library; then within a few years, it got some traction. Then as WebSockets was becoming mainstream, I migrated my framework from HTTP long-polling to WebSockets but realized that it didn&#x27;t add much value anymore, so I added pub&#x2F;sub and RPC functionality to it (I also built some additional components so that it would run as a self-sharding cluster on Kubernetes).<p>Then I was working in the blockchain space and so I decided to build a lightweight quantum-resistant blockchain using my pub&#x2F;sub library for peer-to-peer messaging... Then after I finished the blockchain, I decided that it would be fun to build a decentralized exchange on top of it and so I did. It&#x27;s been running for a few years without issues though it&#x27;s low volume but the community around it is dedicated.<p>Now I&#x27;m looking for new things which I could build on top of the blockchain and DEX. I&#x27;m thinking to use it as a payment system which accepts multiple cryptocurrencies interchangeably. I have a few ideas but I&#x27;m more focused on earning money nowadays so I&#x27;m hesitant to start anything new. Lol. After all that work, I only earn about $1000 per month in passive income. I&#x27;m a brute-force entrepreneur.<p>It&#x27;s pretty easy to maintain all this. Like the author says; tests help, but even more important is to keep the number of third-party dependencies to a minimum and to avoid using overly niche programming features or features which are unlikely to be forward-compatible.

&gt; Technically I’m actively maintaining all of them, in that if someone reports a bug I’ll push out a fix.<p>Ironically, I toned down my enthusiasm for this author&#x27;s (many) projects after my initial perusing led me to something interesting[0] that didn&#x27;t work, and the subsequent issues and minor (but linked to issues!) PRs I contributed went completely without response for the last few years. They&#x27;re still open.<p>To be clear, I&#x27;m grateful for the work the author is freely providing for me and the world! And I could certainly do a better job with some of the projects I help maintain as well. He&#x27;s under no obligation to respond to issues if he doesn&#x27;t have time or just doesn&#x27;t want to. But it does speak to how difficult it can be to maintain over a hundred projects, even if you have a system.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dogsheep&#x2F;healthkit-to-sqlite" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dogsheep&#x2F;healthkit-to-sqlite</a>

I was trying to find an issue management system for doing “the perfect commit” and tried loads without thinking of GitHub issues, which is obviously the correct place to put things. Exciting to hear about GitHub projects too which sounds fantastic!<p>I would love to watch a day of programming by someone as prolific as Simon to see what other things he does to maintain speed and keep churning out code!

Very inspirational.<p>“Massively increase your productivity on personal projects with comprehensive documentation and automated tests”.<p>Is the possibly more enticing subtitle, for people who don&#x27;t automatically click when they see the simonwillison.net doman, but frankly it goes beyond that to something more like &quot;Getting Things Done for open source side projects&quot;

I&#x27;m trying to manage my projects mostly like the steps the OP takes. The only thing that I would add, which has helped me is, is having build automation in place as well (CI&#x2F;CD or just scripts like a Makefile).<p>This could fall under tests, but I&#x27;ve found that having concrete steps written down on how to build the thing helps. As there&#x27;s many times something that&#x27;s easy to forget that has to happen for things build correctly if I&#x27;ve stepped away from the project for a while.

Writing tests? For personal projects? More like &quot;Coping strategies for the project hoarding masochist&quot; amirite.<p>I suppose it depends on what you&#x27;re trying to do, but the thing about personal projects is that you don&#x27;t <i>have</i> to maintain them :P