DEV Community

Cover image for Getting Sidetracked
Ben Force
Ben Force

Posted on • Originally published at justwriteapps.com on

Getting Sidetracked

How do I stop my side-projects from getting sidetracked? I've started so many projects over the years with an honest intent on building a product, but very few have ever ended up fully working.

I only have a handful of exceptions to this. I built a screenwriting app, an Alexa Skill, and some dev tools for work. That's it.

The process is pretty familiar at this point. I have a moment of inspiration where I read something, or I'm using a tool and think it has a flaw that I could fix. Almost instantly I start designing and developing the idea--researching APIs and coding furiously for several weeks in my free time.

Eventually I'll run into some problem when I'm about 80% done. Or, sometimes, I just run out of motivation. Then the inevitable happens--I get inspiration for another project and the cycle starts again.


Now I'm working on ways to force myself to finish. One of those ideas is to start blogging about my projects. Hopefully making a public statement that I'm working on something will help keep me motivated.

Now for the actual update on Wrenchly, I've added some fuel efficiency graphs on the main page. There was a bug caused by how I was creating some widgets so I didn't make much progress on the service reminder functionality. I did learn a lot about the riverpod library which will help in future development.

Screenshot_1617447574.png


Photo by Gigi on Unsplash

Top comments (0)