Do you have something you continually work on for years?

I've been working on lots of little tools for years, sure. They are all extensions of theories or long term projects though, so they are like theory-practice glue scripts in many cases.

A basic first step here with projects (tool or no) IMO is to keep a log.

Over time you add different logs for different projects. It's important to have lots to choose from. One of the best ways I've seen people crash and burn their long term projects is to make sure there are only like three of them. Especially if they are passion projects.

Then I have a system that kind of shuffles the various log topics and I pick some that I feel like working on, usually at least 2-3 a day.

So there are things like stories, TTRPGs, lists (this is a great place to start IMO, maintaining a list over time can teach a lot and is very forgiving), bigger hobby projects, and so on.

IMO #2 one of the most helpful things you can write in a log is "this project isn't going anywhere and I don't know what to do about it."

Just some thoughts, good luck.

I wrote a tool to help students organized and sustain academic projects. It took me 5 years and 13,000 lines. I worked hours on it almost every day. The reason I could sustain such an effort was I once had to withdraw from Stanford because of ADHD, and I wanted to help others avoid my problems. [I though I might make a few bucks too.] I think it might help some of you sustain your projects. If I mention it's name, I'll get in trouble from the moderators. Look on the Mac App Store under Streamline Academic Writing.

I've been working on an uptime monitoring SaaS (that evolved into more of an "Incident Management" service with status pages) for about two hours each weekday since February 2021.

I think what keeps me going at this point is mainly habit and still learning new things each week, whether it's product management, marketing, accounting, or how to survive 19k people flooding your demo status page...

(the link is https://onlineornot.com, for the curious)

I’ve started a lot of ambitious DIY projects that I then abandoned (AR glasses, beaglebone based cellphone, etc).

My (still unfinished) PhD thesis is my longest project so far and its teaching me how to keep grinding. I feel like having a deep motivation and some structure helps for me (although a very tenuous one as I started during lockdown so my PhD time was mostly remote work so far).

Being autonomous motivates me to do things, but having people you have to explain your stuff to helps to keep working when its hard.

Streamie (streamieapp.com), which started its life as CameraMan (macOS only), was my DIY solution for getting my security cameras on my desktop computer. Later, when tvOS (Apple TV) finally added VideoToolbox support, I had a much better platform to target for such things.

I started dabbling with this project in 2014. It’s a full time endeavor these days. I become _very_ uncomfortable when I think about how I’d react if I lost all copies of the source code. I don’t think I’d try to start over.

My co-founder and I were working at Instacart and started building https://rootly.com/ (incident management on Slack) before turning it into a full-time job, building a team, and now working with some fantastic companies like Canva, Grammarly, Squarespace, OpenSea, etc!

I have been working on decentralization for 3 years and almost have it universally solved. Decentralization is not what most people on HN appear to think it is.

> I'm the kind of person that starts/abandons a lot of projects.

Is this fun for you? If so, why change it?

Have been and will continue to, living code gen and data modeling

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof