The stages of a side project

One experience of mine, though it has roughly mapped to previous side projects:

• Wow this thing that has no business model is a cool idea, I wonder if anyone has done it before?
• This is fun, let’s spend an evening hacking on it
• Wow this is taking way more time than I thought it would …
• Can I do this without spending any money? Let’s use AWS free tier to get this going
• OK let’s ship this thing, wow it’s getting a lot of attention! Front-page on hackernews, subreddit, etc.
• I’m totally ready for this, I have a scaling plan
• Oops my scaling plan is completely useless because the bottlnecks are not where I expected they would be
• Wow traffic really drops off when it isn’t on hackernews 🤔
• Oh wait someone tweeted it, there goes traffic again..
• I should probably add CI to make this a bit easier to maintain
• OK things are stable again
• Wait my free tier is about to expire, let’s figure out how to host this for free by using multi-cloud
• Whoa this is taking longer than I thought
• .. years pass
• OK something is broken and getting some email complaints, I really have lost interest in this thing
• Have a free weekend, let’s look at the code from years ago
• Good god, it’s terrible
• Well, a bunch of things are now deprecated, let’s at least fix that
• OK so if I am going through this trouble I should probably re-write some of it, especially the last parts that were just thrown together…
• Whoa this is taking longer than I thought…

Introducing a newer version of cmdchallenge .. A lone survivor in a sea of broken things I have had an itch to build.