In my website, there’s a tiny section right below my showcased projects that serves as a project graveyard of sorts. It’s a small list of ideas that I’ve had before that weren’t expanded and explored all that much. It’s pretty interesting that such things can come around, but I think it’s completely understandable that many developers have their own project graveyards: projects that they started with lots of passion, but for some reason, things just don’t go well and things ended early.

The process of starting a project to me really takes root based on how you’re feeling at the time. Project ideas often come and go as tiny sparks of passion, and sometimes I’d get interested in exploring the ideas more by thinking of how to make it technically feasible. Many of these ideas also came from my own experiences and wants.

A while ago, I was pretty frustrated about how there can be different lyrics — sometimes even having different words altogether — for a song in websites I frequent for lyrics (Genius, Musixmatch, and LyricFind through Google). I wanted a way to have lyrics from all three sources pop up so that I can scroll through them and compare them.

It sounded like a good idea to me, so I started work on it. One of the most fun parts of creating a project is thinking of its name; for some reason, I spend quite a lot of time to pick a mediocre-at-best name for my projects, and I chose Disonnance to be the name for it. Work was pretty good, and it didn’t take a lot of time before I had a brief prototype of it working.

But I never really touched it again. Why?

I turns out that starting a project is a lot more than just developing it, and you kinda need quite a few things at your disposal to pour your heart and soul on the things you make.

Time is the most important part, duh, but sometimes it could just be that you had the time to start it, but as time goes on, your schedule gets more packed so you had to sacrifice time for your project. Sometimes, other newer projects might take priority, so you work on them while the older projects you were previously working on fade away into oblivion. That was something I realised only recently with my pattern of making projects, so it’ll be good to think of ways to revisit old projects.

Passion is next. Even if you had the time to revisit old projects, sometimes you just don’t have the flame that came with the spark of that idea as you did back then. For me, I think the main reason why I dropped Dissonance was my realisation that, “hey, maybe I don’t really need this”, and suddenly everything poofed away in terms of my attention and passion towards it. After all, developing can get pretty boring at times, and the only thing to push you through those moments is the spirit of seeing things through to completion.

Self-pacing and management of your energy was something I didn’t realise was important in being able to maintain a project. It ties in with what I said about passion in that it fuels it directly. When you usually start a project, you’re more likely than not pouring a lot of energy and spending a lot of time on it. You feel that thrill with developing things: you stay up overnight because you can and you want to, and finding a fix for bugs feel like you’ve conquered the world. You know, that feeling that you wanna feel when you make a project.

I realised that perfectionism can come into play too. I like to think that I’m naturally a perfectionist by heart, and I love, love, love the details in the work I’m doing. When you start working on a project, you start from scratch. That comes with everything being all over the place and things looking less than ideal at first. For me, personally, I think that played a major part in persuading me away from my old passion projects, and it’s something that I need to come to realise to: as much as I’d love the styling to be perfect and oomph on the first try, the reality doesn’t seem to support that. You’ll probably need loads of iterations before something looks good.

Moving forward, I think it’s time to ask the question, “why am I leaving this project alone?” before we hop between passion projects. It’s one thing to say “oh, I’m just not feeling it anymore”, but it is another to start asking why and drilling deep into why you feel that way. Who knows, maybe you’ll discover something about the way you work?

I feel like more developers should consider showing their project graveyards when they showcase themselves as developers. Project graveyards are a testament to your creativity, while being vulnerable and showing internal processes inside of you that led to the project being there (rest in peace, project). They’re a good way to show that you have a lot of ideas, but also that you’re human and can’t do everything at once. It’s both about being proud of what you’ve done, but also being humble about what you can do.

For me, I think I need to be more mindful and conscious about starting projects. I need to care less about the state of things as they are in the early versions, and focus at the heart of the project: why am I making this, and for who? After all, projects don’t just get made overnight: usually, they’re labours of love put in by the people who created them. And that’s something good to have and take good care of, don’t you think?