Side Project Graveyard
Every repo deserves a proper burial.
18 graves. Enter quietly.
The keeper's note
Every developer keeps a folder of projects that quietly stopped. This is where mine are laid to rest, each with a stone, a cause of death, and the last commit message it left behind.
Walk slowly. Read a few epitaphs. If one of them looks like something in your own folder, light a candle. It will not bring the project back, but the keeper will notice.
The register
- Graves
- 18
- Buried
- 14
- Retired with honour
- 3
- Undead
- 1
- Average life
- 355 days
- Most common cause
- Lost interest
- Shortest life
- PDF Viewer SDK
The graves
The oldest are nearest the gate. The undead wait at the back.
2013–2014 · lived 230 days
Transposed every song I knew, which was four.
Lost interest
off by one
2011–2015 · lived 1,421 days
Still serves one dentist's website. Nobody remembers the admin password.
A better tool shipped
200 OK
2015 · lived 77 days
Watched four servers until its author was hired to watch four hundred.
Got a real job
TODO: alerts
2016 · lived 2 days
It had three tasks. All three were about finishing it.
Lost interest
☐ finish ☐ finish ☐ finish
2019 · lived 113 days
One subscriber, who was me. Open rate: 100%.
Nobody came
unsubscribe
2017–2019 · lived 649 days
It had a router, an ORM and a philosophy. It never had a user.
Scope creep
v0.0.9
2018–2020 · lived 472 days
Three posts. 1,412 dependencies. The posts were about the dependencies.
Dependency hell
npm audit fix --force
2020–2021 · lived 413 days
A place for all my notes. It holds two, both about how to organise notes.
Scope creep
organise notes
2021–2022 · lived 218 days
Tracked nine tokens in real time. Outlived seven of them.
Nobody came
2 of 9
2019–2022 · lived 1,169 days
Rewritten in three frameworks. Tracked the same eleven books each time.
Rewrote it in a new framework and never finished
v1 → v2 → v3
2021–2024 · lived 1,233 days
Worked in every version of Chrome but the next one.
Dependency hell
manifest v3
2026 · lived less than a day
A client-side PDF viewer SDK. Created and last pushed on the same day.
Lost interest
2026 · lived 17 days
A daily robot that read the developer internet and threw away the noise.
Lost interest
Retired with honour
Still Warm
2026 · lived 6 days
A museum where comfort food is the art.
Shipped v1, never looked back
Retired with honour
GOOD DOG
2026 · lived 2 days
A game where you are the dog. The dog is real.
Shipped v1, never looked back
Retired with honour
Kindness Chain
2026 · lived 8 days
One sentence from you. One dime from me. Verified on-chain.
Shipped v1, never looked back
Undead
since 2022 · still twitching
Not dead. Resting. The rewrite has almost caught up with 2022.
Rewrote it in a new framework and never finished
wip