most of my side projects go nowhere. i'm fine with it.

most of my projects are dead. like, genuinely, if you could open my hard drive and browse the folder of half-finished stuff in there you'd think i have a problem. and maybe i do. but i've stopped feeling bad about it.

here's the thing nobody says out loud: building stuff for yourself is completely valid, and it's also completely fine if it dies when you stop needing it.

built for me, not for a pitch deck

a lot of what i make starts as a personal itch. i need something, nothing exists that does exactly what i want, so i build it. i use it for a bit. then life happens, or i just lose interest, and the project quietly flatlines.

and honestly? that's okay. the project did its job. it was never a product, it was a tool. tools don't need to live forever.

the problem is when you start treating every side project like it needs to be a startup, like it needs a landing page and a waitlist and a ProductHunt launch. most things don't need that. most things are just you solving your own problem in your spare time and that's allowed.

the 1% rule

out of everything i've built, probably 1% has ever gone public. the rest either never left my machine or quietly got abandoned.

that sounds depressing until you flip it: the stuff that did go public, i actually believed in. i only shipped when i was genuinely convinced it would help other people, not just me.

the wrapped thing (wrapped.devmatei.com) is the clearest example. i built it because i use Navidrome instead of Spotify, and every December my friends post their Wrapped and i just sat there. so i made my own. it was scratching a personal itch first. but then i thought, there's probably other people using ListenBrainz who feel the same way, and there was no good tool for this yet.

so i cleaned it up, made it actually nice, and shipped it. it got listed on the official ListenBrainz apps page, blew up on Reddit, and it's still the most successful thing i've ever made. all because it started as something i actually needed myself.

why the graveyard isn't a waste

every dead project taught me something. a React pattern, a new API, how to not structure a database. the learning doesn't disappear just because the project did.

and there's something weirdly freeing about building with zero pressure. no users to disappoint, no changelog to maintain, no github issues from strangers at 2am. just you, a blank file, and a problem you want to solve. some of my best experiments came from projects that lasted two weeks and then got yeeted.

the toxic part of dev culture is acting like every line of code needs to ship or it was a waste of time. it wasn't. you practiced. you learned. you scratched the itch. move on.

the actual bar for shipping

if i'm being honest, the bar i set for myself before going public is pretty high. it needs to actually be useful for people beyond just me. it needs to be good enough that i'm not embarrassed by it. and ideally it should hit a gap that isn't already covered better by something else.

that combo is rare. hence the 1%.

since wrapped, i've been trying to find that same lightning-in-a-bottle feeling. personal need + other people have this need + nothing good exists yet. it's a harder formula to hit than it sounds. most ideas fail one of those three.

but the dead projects in the meantime? i don't regret them.

stay unbothered lads :P <3