How to stay motivated on projects

About me

I'm a full-time developer working at a b2b saas startup based in Austin, Tx. I genuinely enjoy developing software. I created my first .html file around five years ago, but didn't really commit to learning until about two and a half years ago. I quit my job as an automotive technician about a year ago, and received my first job offer in October of 2021 as a ruby on rails developer.

My experience with projects

I currently have about thirty repositories on GitHub. I consistently work on two of those in my free time, and have been working on those two for about eight months. I have probably deleted 15-20 other repositories. So how am I qualified to give you advice on staying motivated to work on your projects? Well, maybe i'm not. But If you'll take a few moments, I'll let you know how I am staying motivated on these projects, and how i'm really enjoying working on them.

Projects I've stayed motivated on

Currently both of the projects I still work on are CLI (command line interface) tools. I actually created them to help me build web applications faster. They are both generators, Which generate all of the crud routes for a Node.js api and crud routes and pages for Next.js. They still need a lot of work and are not generating production ready code yet. But I truly enjoy the time I spend working on them. I believe they will be really helpful to others one day, and that is really important to me.

Projects I've lost motivation on

I've built an anonymous polling application. I've built games using Unity. I've started building a e-commerce site for classic vehicles and parts. I've written a basic javascript game(which i've been told is great and should be put on the app store). I've written so much more than what is listed. But at one point or another, I decided to stop working on them.

How I stay motivated on projects

I would love to be able to give you a clear defined answer on how to stay motivated on your projects, but I just don't think it's that simple. Staying motivated on a project has a lot to do with the idea itself. For me, It needs to have at least two of these things. It needs to be something other people might actually use, it needs to be something I can actually maintain, or it needs to be something really "cool". The only caveat being that It's very important to finish projects that are part of the learning process. Maybe you want to build a cool app or learn Next.js, but have no experience in vanilla javascript. Well, you're probably gonna have to start with a much more simple project in vanilla javascript before learning Next.js.

Conclusion

I hope this article has helped or at least been interesting to read. I know I haven't given a clear conclusion on how to help you stay motivated. At the very least I hope you see that it's okay to lose motivation on projects, and that it happens to most of us. Thank you for taking the time to read this article! I'm still trying to improve my writing, I'll be posting more about the cli tools i'm creating so be sure to follow me if you might be interested in that.

Help others in the comments

In the comments, take a moment and leave your best tip for staying motivated on your projects.