Finishing Something Once a Month

In the last few months of 2021 I built a couple small projects that gave me a little bit of pride. I have a whole virtual filing cabinet of projects I haven’t finished, and I had forgotten what it was like to make something and show it off.

I’ve always been a kind of maker, I’d spend time building little projects here and there. I taught myself how to code at an early age, learned how to make designs that looked good. I’ve stuck a toe into the world of hardware, and even learned through trial and error how to repair boats and motors— buying and repairing my own sailboat and (somewhat) repairing a center console and it’s old outboard. I have to have a project, or a few, to dig into at any given time.

What I haven’t been good at, however, is seeing projects through past the point they give me fulfilment. Eventually, especially with software projects the fun experiment transitions into something else. I’m sure that any other software engineer reading this probably has had the same experience, and probably has a graveyard of unfinished projects of their own.

So my resolution for the new year is to do more of that. Make something and put it out there, for better or for worse.

I’ve given myself a few simple rules to follow:

• Any given project can’t be more than a few weekends of work in scope.
• Something has to be released every month.
• Commercial viability, product-market-fit, or people generally liking it at all aren’t qualifications that need to be met.

So you’re looking at project number one, a personal blog site with a few posts queued up talking about a project or two I finished in 2021, and serve as a place for talking about what else I build in the next 12 months.