On side projects

Every once in a while, I start a new project and I feel like it's going to be a project I focus on for a long time. Most of the time though, I forget about it in a few weeks. One example of this, is my "open source self-hostable chat", I thought it would be something I work on for a while, but eventually I just got bored of it.

This happens with a lot of my side projects, very few actually catch on, and the ones that do, are the ones I never expected to work on for more than a few hours.

For example, a while back, I built a "Post Viewer" for the Scratch forums called ocular. I went through many iterations before it reached where it is today, but I really like the final product, and it's managed to get over 1000 users within less than a year, which is just awesome.

Sometimes, I wonder what would have happened if I kept building upon one of my many side projects. I think something that's really important, is that those "failed" projects were not a waste of my time. I learned so much from each of them, and I think I wouldn't be where I am today without them.