I have - and still - struggle with this. My (unsolicited) advice:
1. just start anything NOW. Don't worry about getting organized or the correct order; just go. The act of working creates momentum; early on moving is more important than progress.
2. today's good enough > tomorrow's perfect. I found an OSS project for something I was going to build to help me capture "personal content". It's rough and not exactly what I was after but good enough. I've built (less than) half a system to help me with my job on top of PocketBase. Maybe someday I'll finish it (or even add another feature - #1 above has lots of ideas captured!) but until then I get value today.
3. Find something that has ongoing personal value: I help an animal rescue and pay the ongoing costs to run the system I built more than 10 years ago. Dropping $20/month to $5/month is possible but not a big enough motivation for a significant new version. The looming tech debt and support load might be over the rest of this year though!
4. Recognize that the incomplete part of side projects is a feature not a bug. Curiosity and exploration almost always end in specific dead ends, but the illumination gained can be used throughout your life. It's largely the act not the explicit output.
It sounds like the parent comment is saying they may benefit from NOT doing this. They say they have a million unfinished projects, but if you just GO without a plan, sometimes the momentum fatally wanes when you hit a point where you realized you've painted yourself into a corner.
I'm not saying a completely fleshed-out design document will help, but maybe a rough roadmap with milestone release dates would help keep the projects on track.
You upload your side projects’ data/github/seni-working-prototype, it performs a very quick ritualistic ceremony/blessing and buries it in a little marked grave.
Visitors are free to go grave robbing if they wish.
I like the idea. The cemetery could be a large scrollable top-down map where the user could click on each headstone to get a synopsis and a link to where it's hosted.
Meh, just change your personal definition of "finished" and everything gets easier :)
I too struggled with the feeling of not completing things, until I realized I didn't actually want to "finish" projects in the sense of "have paying users" but instead wanted to learn something new, try out some design/architecture or just solve a personal problem.
So for the last few years, my "finished" ratio is much higher, as I got the value I wanted out of almost every project I started.
I don't see this as a bad thing. Most people make side projects for fun, trying knew things, solidifying knowledge, etc.
I mean, if you have a goal of starting a SaaS and you've spent years starting and stopping a bunch of projects that you never follow through on then yeah, you should improve on that. But that's not most people with a bunch of unfinished side projects.
Maybe someone can make a curated wiki page of people's unfinished and/or abandoned projects so everyone can put theirs there? (Oh wait, that's just github.)
I actually love this part of github; it reminds me of the old internet, full of under construction Geocities pages and other half-baked projects. It's the polar opposite of today's bland, instagram-perfect same-same internet.
Yep. I love finding someone's old project on github and going through it and especially comparing it to stuff they did release and seeing how it was merely a stepping stone and a way for them to learn something. That significantly influenced how I code and helped me to be okay with writing code that never sees the light of day, as long as it helps me get past something in a project that does.
But it would be so huge I can’t afford the hosting bill.