How many unfinished projects do you have? What are they?

Question

I know that many, many developers, start projects and then get stuck or lose interest and move on to something else. Do you have any unfinished projects and why did you stop? Did you ever motivate yourself to come back and finish it, or are you deleting them after some time and forget about the original idea?

Answer 1

No software project is ever fully completed.

I've stopped working on projects when I've changed jobs. Some ideas for new features had to be abandoned because the cost/benefit wasn't there. Some bugs get fixed, some don't. But I can't remember ever abandoning a software project.

Answer 2

I'm a serial unfinisher - repeatedly, I put very skeletal open source code out (mostly on code.google.com) and see if I can attract other developers to get synergy. Sometimes I manage -- mostly I don't, and then those projects end up "unfinished" (unless I ever get renewed motivation to work on them even without the huge boost of other active open-source collaborators -- sometimes it does happen;-). To quote great novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr, "so it goes"!-)

Answer 3

A few of my projects have died, mostly for my lost excitement.

The truth of the matter is, though, that if you, the person who came up with the idea, lose excitement about it, who in the real world is going to give a damn about the project in the first place? Sometimes you just have to take what you've learned from a project and throw it out.

Rapid iteration, right?

Answer 4

I've got a part-built visual debugger for spatial algorithms (GIS stuff)... it even sort-of works... at the time I was hacking away at a clipping algorithm, and I thought it would be marvelous to like watch a movie or in slow-mo, or frame-by-frame, and/or set break-points and step through the code; watching it's effect on the geometry... I just never quite got it to do all that... It turned out to be quicker/simpler/easier just to write "the current version of" the geometry out to WKT, and paste it into JUMP (simple open source GIS package)... So I got lazy again... and went back to my real job ;-(

However: This "stalled" project lead to the visual debugger aspect of another little project... one for which a sizable TODO list (difficulties-wise, for me anyway) remains outstanding... and it ain't gonna get shortened this weekend either.

So yes you might say I leave a cookie-trail of incomplete projects behind me... just incase I ever feel the urge to quit programming and regain my sanity ;-)

I have a short attention span... If a for-fun-project can't be done in a couple of weeks it ain't gonna happen!

Cheers. Keith.

Answer 5

Do you have any unfinished projects and why did you stop? Too many to count! I keep track of them all now for years. Everyone I start and every note about them, in case I come back to them.

Did you ever motivate yourself to come back and finish it, or are you deleting them after some time and forget about the original idea? Not really. The reason I think most programmers don't finish their projects is because they either see the end in site and the initial challenge is gone (therefore there all that is left is the uninteresting work). Or, they realized the idea/project was crap to begin with. Which is usually a bad thing because others may actual get some value from the finished product even if the developer may not of.

Answer 6

To many ideas and not enough hours per day...

The sad truth is that it is easy to start something, but really hard to run with it all the way.

Answer 7

For me there are two categories of 'unfinished project'. The first is (as Robert said) projects that never really finish. The best example is

Searcharoo.net

which has had 7 iterations but still has a long way to go, if it is to perform all the tasks it should. I will continue to work on the code as long as people keep emailing me about it - but it goes for months without any attention; then I might concentrate on it for a week before another long period. The key thing that gets me working on it is an interesting problem to solve. Mundane bugs or 'simple' features or tidying the code never motivates me as much as needing to do something tricky.

Other things that I have started because they seemed cool/fun, but stopped when I solved the initial problem and got bogged down in 'generic code' (you know: membership/login, robust error handling, UI tweaking) include:

RaceReplay.net - which was written originally in WPF/E :) and updated for SL1 -- although this has recently been re-activated since the MS SL VE Map Control. Sat for well over 12 months without any action though

RecipeNow.net - originally written in .NET 1.0, updated for 2.0 and planned to re-write in MVC (one day...). I've even started (but not finished, of course) an iPhone version. There are grand plans for membership, contributions, sharing, community... all started but not finished...

SilverlightEarth.com - MS/google map viewer written in Javscript and WPF/E;SL1, long before DeepZoom. Half-done 'Ink' support. Half-done map rotation. Half-done SL2 migration... the half-working code is on the website for everyone to see (it's Javascript - just view-source to see all the crap hacks and TODOs)

Geoquery2008.com - SQL 2008 geospatial query tool. Spent a solid chunk of time over about 2 months getting it 80% of the way to a "real" product... but it has stagnated since then as an 'almost useful' tool.

DeepZoomPublisher.com - this one is very sad, as I have written the 'Console Application' back-end (and posted examples of how it works) but never got around to writing the promised Windows UI nor actually publishing the code itself... so if you go to the website you get to see examples of what it does, but you can't really find the application that does it :-( my bad.

To answer the other part of the question - I never intentionally delete them, although I have "accidentally" tidied up my PCs and somehow deleted all copies of one or two 'half-done projects'. VERY frustrated at myself - because I like to have the option of coming back to finish them... even if I never do ;-)

Network Solutions are happy, though, as whenever I get excited about a new project I register a domain name for it.

I think blogs - particularly those where the author is knowledgeable and kind enough to write little examples/samples - take the place of 'unfinished projects' for some people. If you have a cool idea you just code up the minimum to demonstrate how cool it is - post it on your blog and leave it at that! (unfinished)guilt-free :-)

Answer 8

Many: word processor for XML, vector graphics editor for manifolds, two different programming languages and their compilers, a Python imaging toolkit, a level editor for a game, several computer games, a mud, a prolog interpreter, a modular synthesizer for music, a procedural image generator, blog software, static website generator, a wiki.

Most are deep-sixed, some are shelved in the back of my brain, and three are still active. One I've been working on for nearly a decade. But the projects expand to fill the available time, which, when you're doing it as a hobby, is the rest of your life.