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 unfinished projects and why did you stop? Have you ever motivated yourself to come back and finish it, or do you delete them after a while and forget about the original idea?

Answer 1

For many ideas and not enough hours a day ...

The sad truth is that it is easy to start something, but in fact it is difficult to work with it to the end.

Answer 2

For me there are two categories of "work in progress". The first (as Robert said) projects that never end. The best example:

Searcharoo.net

which had 7 iterations but still has a long way to go if it has to complete all the tasks it has to complete. I will continue to work on the code, as long as people continue to email me about this, but it goes on for months without any attention; then I could focus on it for a week before another long period. The main thing that makes me work on it is an interesting problem to solve . Mundane errors or "simple" functions or embellishment of the code never motivates me in the same way as doing something complicated.

Other things that I started because they seemed cool / funny, but stopped when I solved the initial problem and got stuck in the “common code” (you know: membership / login, reliable error handling, setting the user interface) include:

RaceReplay.net - which was originally written in WPF / E :) and updated for SL1 - although it has recently been revised, has been activated since the installation of MS SL VE Map Control. Sat for more than 12 months without any action, although

RecipeNow.net - originally written in .NET 1.0, updated for version 2.0 and is planned to be rewritten in MVC (one fine day ...). I even started (but not finished, of course) the iPhone version. There are grandiose plans for membership, contributions, sharing, community ... it all started, but it did not end ...

SilverlightEarth.com - MS / google viewer written in Javscript and WPF / E; SL1, long before DeepZoom. Support half ink. Half turn the card. Half-done SL2 migration ... half-working code is on the website so everyone can see (this is Javascript - just a source view to see all the crunchy hacks and TODOs)

Geoquery2008.com is the SQL 2008 geospatial query tool. Spent a whole bunch of time in about two months, getting 80% off the path to a “real” product ... but it has since stalled as an “almost useful” tool.

DeepZoomPublisher.com is very sad since I wrote the “Console Application” in the background (and posted examples of how it works), but I didn’t get to writing the promised Windows user interface and did not publish the code itself ... so if you go to the site, you will see examples of what it does, but you cannot find an application that does this :-( my bad.

To answer another part of the question, I never intentionally deleted them, although I “accidentally” tidied up my computers and somehow deleted all copies of one or two “semi-finished products”. VERY upset about myself - because I like being able to come back to finish them ... even if I don’t; -)

Network solutions are pleased that when I am delighted with a new project, I will register a domain name for it.

I think that blogs - especially those where the author is knowledgeable and amiable enough to write small examples / samples - replace "unfinished projects" for some people. If you have a cool idea, you just copy the minimum to demonstrate how cool it is - post it on your blog and leave it to it! (unfinished) without fault :-)

Answer 3

No software project has been completed completely.

I stopped working on projects when I change tasks. Some ideas for new features had to be abandoned because there were no costs or benefits. Some bugs fixed, some not. But I do not remember to ever abandon a software project.

Answer 4

I am a serial uninisher - repeatedly, I post very skeletal open source code (mainly on code.google.com) and see if I can attract other developers to get synergy. Sometimes I manage - mostly I don’t do this, and then these projects end up “incomplete” (unless I get an updated motivation to work on them, even without a huge increase in the number of other active open source employees - sometimes this happens; - ) To quote the great writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr., “this is how it goes!” -)

Answer 5

Several of my projects have died, mainly due to my lost excitement.

True, it is true that if you, the person who came up with this idea, lose your excitement about this, who in the real world will attack the project in the first place? Sometimes you just need to take what you learned from the project and throw it away.

Fast iteration, right?

Answer 6

I have a built-in visual debugger for spatial algorithms (GIS material) ... it even sorts the work ... while I was hacking the clipping algorithm, and I thought it would be nice to watch how to watch a movie or in slow motion or frame by frame, and / or set breakpoints and go through the code; watching how it affects the geometry ... I just didn't get it to do it all ... It was easier / easier / easier to just write the "current version" of the geometry in WKT and paste it into JUMP (simple package open source GIS) ... So I was lazy again ... and returned to my real job; - (

However: this “stalled” project leads to the aspect of the visual debugger another small project ... one for which a meaningful TODO list (in any case, it’s still difficult for me) will not be shortened this weekend either.

So yes , you can say that I leave cookie traces of unfinished projects behind me ... I just feel that I want to get away from programming and restore intelligence; -)

I have a short attention span ... If a fun project cannot be done in a couple of weeks, this will not happen!

Greetings. Whale.

Answer 7

Do you have unfinished projects and why did you stop? Too much! I track them all for many years. Everyone I start, and every note about them, in case I get back to them.

Have you ever motivated yourself to come back and finish it, or do you delete them after a while 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 on the site and the initial call is gone (so all that remains is an uninteresting job). Or they realized that an idea / project is shit to begin with. This is usually bad because others can get some value from the finished product, even if the developer cannot do it.

Answer 8

Many: a word processor for XML, a vector graphics editor for collectors, two different programming languages ​​and their compilers, a set of tools for creating Python images, a level editor for the game, several computer games, dirt, a prolog interpreter, a modular synthesizer for music, a process generator images, blog software, static website generator, wiki.

Most of them are deeply mixed, some of them are deposited in the back of my brain, and three are still active. One of them I have been working for almost ten years. But projects expand to fill the available time, which, when you do it as a hobby, is the rest of your life.