Being a short burst coding guy by Cedric Dugas on June 12, 2012

One thing that is starting to be clear as I evolve into web programming is that I have a lot of problems with personal projects that take more than 3 months from start to “finish”.

My GoDaddy account could tell you this, the domains tab is a land of broken dreams & unfinished projects. Some of my unfinished projects :

SlideIt (a web powerpoint like editor)

BambinBazar (a french classified ads website focusing on the children vertical)

mobile-slides (a web ios app for creating mobile prototypes with html)

- Worst with that one I wasn’t far from releasing it.. 2 years ago, check that video and website presenting it. Still it did not uphold the standards I wanted to meet at that time..

This is also an effect that I am currently experiencing with Weddingdeck. After putting more than one hundred hours (maybe 200), the motivation is starting to fade and my mind is drifting away on other “cooler” projects.

My best projects also always has been short, my form validation script was a 5 hours project that evolved over the years into the monster it is now. I also have multiple plugin that took around 5 to 20 hours, I am particularly proud of my github releases project that I currently use for Weddingdeck. It’s nice to put something out there fast when you compared that to the general cycles of software development.

It seems that I really need to reap the reward of my efforts as soon as possible, and I’m quite not sure how to get out of this pattern. One of the way I accomodate with it is to work per feature, finishing one feature of a project certainly feels good like anyone know.

This is also something that I replicated in other areas of my life. I love to discover new things, learn as much as I can from it, and after sometime I move on a bit. An example would be Porto wines, 1 year ago I was all about creating a cellier in my basement, read on the best brand, how to conserve it and etc. While I still like porto wine, I stopped buying vintage bottles more than 6 months ago. Now I pretty much moved on into Scotch (okay now I sound like an alcoholic).

Currently, (as personal projects goes) I am focusing on a html5 mobile app for Cakemail, and I also started a small rss reader for tablets and phones similar to pulse, the goal with this one was to see if it was possible to create a “native experience” with html on the latest ios and android (and it seems like it’s kinda possible).

What about you guys? Having the same problem?