📅 2026-08-03
As someone who has a fair share of hobby projects waiting in the drawer, I can say this is an opportunity to consider your true motives for working on these "failed" efforts.
A hobby project is fueled by excitement and the enjoyment one gets for creating something new. The unfortunate truth is that excitement is always fleeting and, once a software project grows larger, it is less and less enjoyable to work on. The increasing cognitive load makes the process more and more challenging as time goes on. It is only natural that eventually greater enjoyment is found in something else.
Software projects are never finished, per se. One would have to be exceptionally rigorous to decide on set-in-stone end state criteria for a hobby project and then work toward them, and nothing else, until the objectives are met. That does not sound very fun at all, especially when excitement and enjoyment are the primary motivators.
That is not the core issue at hand, though. A more interesting question is, what makes you think a dead hobby project was a failure? It succeeded in delighting and holding your attention for a few days/weeks/months. The truth is, that was the project's primary purpose. No one (probably) asked you to create the project in the first place, so no one is let down that it didn't reach whatever end state you may have imagined it to have. This mismatch between one's unrealistic hopes and dreams and the reality of software development is ultimately the problem. The goal posts for a hobby project can be nebulous and ever-shifting, so it is more likely than not that you were never going to reach them anyway. In the end, one just need to look at this with the correct perspective: the glass is not half empty because the project was unfinished; the glass is half full because you created something out of nothing and it made you happy.
CC-BY-SA 4.0
The original Gemtext version of this page can be accessed with a Gemini client: gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2026/08/re-dead-ends.gmi