tl;dr Starting new projects is only meaningful if you finish one every once in a while

My mind sometimes travels faster than I can keep up with. I am always reading some new article about the “next big idea” and get really excited about it. I was to know about it. I was to participate in it. I want to DO stuff. It’s in my nature and I can’t stop it.

Sometimes this bites me in the butt. I start a side-project just for fun. I tinker with it; learn and have fun. Then something new catches my eye and I’m on to the next thing. After a while, you look at what I’ve accomplished and it’s a slew of half assed projects that aren’t good enough for anyone to see but me. I may have learned something, but I didn’t ship it.

I’ve been fascinated by the GitHub squirrel since I saw him. A simple image with a simple tag line: “ship it”. Programmers should always be shipping. You should be getting code out the door, into your users hands as soon as possible. Ideas are great, feedback is better. The one thing, however, that I am beginning to see is that we should always be shipping AND always be “finishing”.

Shipping is great. It means progress is being made. It means products are being built. It means concepts are being learned. It doesn’t mean that anything useful has happened.

The last 20% of a project takes as long as the first 80%. There are some things that cannot be learned until a product or project is almost complete. My goal should be to focus on ship, ship, shipping to one project until it’s done.

To that end, I spent some time working on this website over the last few nights. I fixed some issues with displaying the blog post listing (had to do with character encoding). I added a contact form to the Contact page (by utilizing an embeddable form for static sites from Formspree ). Pagination to the blog index page was also added because I do want to blog more often and having a 100 posts on one page woud look ridiculous. Future-proofing a blog doesn’t take much work. And last but not least, I reintegrated the Disqus comments back into the blog. I never really expect to get many comments on these posts but on the off chance that I get a visit from a passerby, and they have a nugget of information that would be useful, I would like them to be able to pass it along if they so desire.

Very soon, this blog will be done and I will be finished. With this project. And move on to the next one.