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Discussion on: How do you find motivation to get your side projects going?

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Scott Simontis

I think another thing to remember about side projects is that they are YOUR projects. You don't have to design an architecture which would make Uncle Bob shed tears of joy or ensure perfect test coverage or anything else for that matter. If you want to do so, by all means do so. But do what you want with it. It's your masterpiece, so have some fun with it!

Maybe I read into this a bit too much, but it seems like you feel compelled to blog sometimes even when you don't want to. What's the worst thing that could happen if you stopped blogging to work on a totally random project that excites you?

I realized I originally started learning to program to make video games and I never have even tried to do so. I want to learn to write some retro games that would run on an N64 or a Wii. I think it's time to chase that vision...as soon as I get these damn bills paid :(

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Kevin Pennekamp

In my case blogging itself was not the thing holding me back, it was the jump to setup the entire website around it. I like having a website and tinker around, but many aspects were holding me back. As described, creating a WordPress website that felt really like my website years ago was quite a time-investment. Just because it was total overkill for my own use-case. I really enjoy doing web-development, especially CSS or even creating my own visuals. So when I create a website I don't just want to take some template and change stuff, I want to create it from scratch (as much as possible). Because this took much more time back then (especially because it was a side project), my ideas for my website already changed before I finished the previous idea. This would ensure that I would loose motivations on two aspects: because I had no website, there was no point in writing blogs, and because I had new ideas, I lost motivation to finish the old idea.