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Peter Kim Frank
Peter Kim Frank Subscriber

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Graveyard Groundskeepers

I've really enjoyed observing the trend of DEV members sharing their own personal project graveyards. A project graveyard is the folder filled with those projects we start and never finish. Every coder has them. It's been a cool outlet to see people share past passion projects, the "could have been's," and the "what was I thinking?" experiments.

Isaac gets full credit for starting the 🌊, with this post:

That inspired a few comments:

Whoo you bring everyone down memory lane.

I haven't such a huge graveyard as you, but here's some shit I've made with love :

AirPad

Allow you to control a web page using another device(s) (smart-phone for example). Using websocket to connect the screen and the device, it should have been able to make multiplayer game on one page.
I don't know why I never finished it.

Pimp-my-natives

Supercharging of natives prototypes. Same thing as underscore while keeping OOP syntaxe. I stated with Array, but never got any further.

Secrets of Cydonia

My first "working" game (I had 2 or 3 failed attempts before). It was supposed to be a cute 2D exploration game. As I wrote everything from scratch, I quickly hit a performance hurdle. I loved coding it anyway.

gmartigny.github.io

Hosted by github set of experiments and random piece of code. That's a real mine, however I'm not sure you could dig out gold. x)

Draw

Easy to use 2D drawing library. I always enjoy drawing on HTML canvas, but it's a pain to use. So I seek out to build a drawing library. I made a few structure mistakes and it became a pain to maintain.

I consider further repos to be in "active" development, so not in graveyard yet. It was fun going back to those old monsters.

Personally, I like how ambitious I was early on:

github.com/MichaelZaporozhets/puddles

some of my more interesting projects over the years:

"History.JS Without the tears"
michaelzaporozhets.github.io/hisht...
github.com/MichaelZaporozhets/hish...

"Synergy.JS: Synergize text"
github.com/MichaelZaporozhets/Syne...

And then the first post, by Kay:

Quickly followed by four more great threads:

I hope this trend continues, and that more folks continue to share their past projects under the #graveyard tag.

It's a fun reminder to all of us that not every project has to become the next Facebook. And hey β€” maybe someone else will be inspired to pick up where you left off.

Top comments (2)

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Isaac Lyman

Great post, I'm really enjoying what everyone has been sharing! Just a thought:

A project graveyard is the folder filled with those projects we start and never finish. Every coder has them.

I'm sure you didn't mean this literally, but it risks giving the impression that unpaid side work is a minimum qualification for being a dev. That's not fair to those who don't have the time, mental energy or inclination to spend their off hours coding. A lot of devs enjoy hacking around in their spare time, but it never hurts to be clear that we do it for fun and education, not because we wouldn't be real coders without it. Programming is a big field and there's room for all kinds. 😊

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call_me_oscar_ profile image
Oscar Wong

Yeah, this is really me. There's more than I can count, but I remember around a year ago, I began working on a project, even spending quite a bit of time on it. Eventually though, I abandoned it because I felt I couldn't complete it, not knowing any backend Dev stuff at the time.

Well, it's a year later, and I've picked it back up. Wish me luck :)