Did you ever finish your favorite hobby projects?

Question

During the years of learning programming and all, I was very enthusiastic and started lots of hobby projects. Among them are a Direct3D game, a synchronization framework, a music player and organizer, an Irrlicht racing game, and so on.

But now that I'm a student there's hardly any time left for working on them (working on both a student research project and the bachelor thesis right now). It is like they're doomed to death, buried alive in their grave labeled ProjectState.DEAD_BUT_NOT_STABLE.

So what are your experiences about own favorite projects? Did you ever finish projects that were dead for, say, 5 or more years? Or do you experience the same lack of time that I do?

Answer 1

Maybe that is the point of the whole "Agile" methodology: Finishing something small and building upon it, if its worth it. Otherwise let it be without having invested too much. And this may also be the reason, why so many hobby projects (my approximately 1 trillion and counting apps included) are never finished: they are not worth it.

At least, they are not worth more than your studies to you. Otherwise, you would not be studying, but rather finishing your projects. I often think, that hobby projects are stepping stones to more useful applications. But no matter what they are: they tought me a lot.

My list of lost apps:

A web portal about sustainable technology and economy: Ethiconomics. A social network for bored people: Linkweilig (witch mashes link with german langweilig==bored). Way too many blogs for more or less specific topics, and a lot of small 2D games for learning geometry. Asteroids and stuff. Oh, and the obligatory quiz chat bot. Also some link collection that was actually useful, but not as good as diigo, digg, etc.

Answer 2

I'd say the problem is more about the abundance of ideas than lack of time. You always have some idea you'd like to implement, and there are a lot of them which stack up every week.

In the end you have to choose what you want to do; you have to prioritize. Either you're doing a personal project to learn something, and stop it when there is nothing more to learn, or you're doing it because you need the tool/app/idea you're working on. The latter has a tendency of having the software in a releasable state which can be considered finished. That is if you ever started it.

Then again, nothing is really finished even if the software you made is released. There are always bugs to fix, always new features to add and thus they're always under construction:

This is why we have open source software… so other people can finish whatever you started.

This is also why we have so many perpetual beta software… so we can finish it later even though we know it will never finish.

I assure you, when you leave school and get into the workforce you will get more ideas. However; the time you have to complete them is unsettingly inversely proportional to the amount of ideas you'll get.

Answer 3

It depends what is your completion criterion. What is finished?

Most hobby projects start with either of the two aims:

1. learn a new technique/idea/concept/style/library
2. have fun

when this is your target, and when you had enough of them, you are finished. The stuff you are left with is not your unfinished hobby project. It was the mean for your hobby project: 1 or 2.

Doing software is a non-constant effort task. While writing a quick mockup for something is fast, bringing it to a level when it's more stable and real takes 10 times more. Having tests, documentation, official releases, maintenance are tasks that require more and more time, and they become a full time job.

Answer 4

No, I have never finished any of my hobby projects. That's what makes them good hobby projects: I can always find something more that I want to do with them.

Answer 5

No, because it can never be finished - you can always think of features you want to add, or code you rather rewrite. A software is only truly finished when you discontinue it...
I did release a few programs as freewares (version 1.+), or did small programs for my friends and family.

Answer 6

Software is never finished, only abandoned.