101 sats \ 7 replies \ @TwoLargePizzas 28 Nov 2023 \ on: You wanna dev? meta
Also a developer.
I'm always working on some sort of side project. Some years ago I started and maintained an open source project in game dev. I spent like 5 years doing that in my spare time. It was a great experience but I got a little burnt out in the end.
Honestly, the idea of starting something that takes years of my life again gives me a little anxiety. But I still work on side projects regularly. I just try to keep the scope small. Weeks to months, not years.
Right now I'm doing game dev stuff again but I've got some Bitcoin related projects on the back-burner. I would love to spend some time learning how to add LN payments to one of my websites or games. I'm a big fan of how SN does it.
P.S. I love seeing people post their projects on SN.
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It started out that way but over time it grew into something more.
Eventually I had thousands of users depending on it and multiple developers contributing to it. Just managing the pull requests was a pretty laboring chore.
It feels wonderful to see people using your project and getting value out of it. That part is very rewarding.
Unfortunately, after 5 years I was still mostly doing it for free. I never set out to make money from it but I had to face the fact it was costing lots of my time and I wasn't getting much in return. I tried a few different ways to fund it and if I could've, I would've kept going. It was very asymmetric in the wrong direction. People expected a lot and gave very little.
Eventually I found someone else to take over the project. So it still lives on to this day, but I've freed my time up to do other things and that feels amazing.
To be fair, not all open source projects are created equal. It's certainly possible to do it other ways. I've seen very successful open source projects where the developers make a good living from donations or some related business. I would consider doing it again, but I would do things differently the second time around.
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I also worked on an open source project that grew enough that people started to demand lot of features, the author there took an amazing decision, he asked everyone to split up the work to be able to sustain the development.
- When someone asked for a feature he asked who he knew to be knowledgeable to discuss it, then he waited till get enough people consensus.
- Then he asked some developers to work on it if he couldn't, they all where external, so it has flaky participation but had always enough people taking over.
- Once everything was done he left the pull request review to another party again, often including the ones asking and discussing the feature.
- When everything was done, the merge was done by him after everything was covered by the unit tests he required to have from the other developers.
He basically decentralised the development, so he could keep going on holidays with his family and relax when he wasn't working on features he wanted himself.
This is but one way to do things, this goes as a mix-and-match for each of us, but I think we should look more at how every growing project take on the management to learn a bit more ourselves.
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When you give lot of time on a project what might happens is that it become so important you what to get achievements on it and without realizing you get drained by everything else around you and it become almost a chore to do.
I understand this feeling and have seen other go through it too.
What I understood is that regular feedback and some kind of reward, like a review, a comment or a zap, can liven up your desire to finish it.
An advice I can give is to stop creating to perfect project and try to start sharing a partial or limited experience and see what happens.
I also have an incredibly long list of projects and ideas on my back, but I keep them there, waiting to have the opportunity to put them into practice where I can recieve the support I needed, an example is my project #meetstr I thought about it years ago but now that I found Nostr it clicked right away and went for it.
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When playing with an idea it's much better to build something super fast and simple first.
A decently fun game can be made even in a couple hours, if you have enough experience, and if there's positive feedback people will be happy to support you to make it bigger and better.
Maybe try sharing some of your progress, experiments and maybe your failures too, surely someone will be there help and give you a push!
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Yep. I've definitely learned some lessons from these experiences.
The funny thing is the project started out as something super fast and simple and I got lots of positive feedback. What I didn't have is a sustainable business model. Although, I didn't really understand this at the time. I don't regret it. I just didn't want to spend the rest of my life working on that project.
I still love working on side projects. I've got a couple of promising ideas that I've been working on. I'm just taking care to do things properly this time around learning from the lessons of the past.
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That's good, you should prioritise what matters to YOU, even in projects made for others.
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