Shelf life of hobby projects

I am a technical co-founder of a successful startup for the last 7 years and an engineer for even longer.

To finalize that one idea that someone will pay for, there are tens of projects that I have worked on that never saw the light. Almost a hundred if you count every single thing I tinkered with.

Some of them were meant to die that way in my ~/code folder. They were hobby projects to burn hands with a new skill, framework or idea.

But some of them had months, if not years, of love poured into them. Those were meant for real users. While building them, I dreamt of millions of paying users, millions of dollars, and the option to retire and become a self-help author. That also meant many of such ideas crashed and burned without hitting any sort of product-market fit.

Months of work, being judged in weeks, and then suddenly moving to the next shiny project… felt blank. I don’t know how else to explain it but something closer to “it hurts but not enough to do anything about it”.

Shoojit Sircar is one of the Indian filmmakers I admire. He spoke about what happens after he makes a film for two years:

The movie gets released, and two years of effort gets judged in two weeks. The world moves on to the next movie by the week after. He too, slowly, and eventually, will move onto some other project. But that vanishing of two years of effort, hardship and mental space left him “blank”.

When Netflix entered the movie arena, he said that it brought a “little shelf life” for his efforts. That his two years of work will persist in the world and audiences could watch it for a much longer time. 

For me, that shelf life could come from open-sourcing my code. 

The only problem… I was dead scared of making my code open-source.

Perhaps it was because ‘shipping fast’ was my first principle with any project. Anything else, like decorating the code, writing test cases or optimizing algorithms, came second. So, if I released my code as is the cracks would be visible.

After years of building-dreaming-crashing, I finally made two projects open-source with my co-founder:

• btw (A minimal website/blog builder. It powers the website you are seeing right now. 6K signups <3)

• Browserable (JS based browser automation framework)

Last month, both repos hit 1000 stars on GitHub organically.

Open-sourcing my projects, once meant to make me millions, and seeing them receive 1K stars, made me feel a bit of calmness that shelf-life gives.

Thanks to you 2K+ people on this planet, wherever you are.