How to Actually Finish Side Projects (A Developer's Guide)

Starting Is Easy. Finishing Is the Skill.

You have probably started a dozen side projects. Maybe more. That GitHub profile with 30+ repositories, most of them touched for two weeks and then abandoned. I know the pattern because I have lived it.

Starting a new project is one of the best feelings in development. Green field. No legacy code. No compromises. Pure potential. You pick your stack, scaffold the project, get the basics running, and for a few days everything feels possible.

Then the feeling fades. The project stops being new and starts being work. The exciting architectural decisions are done, and now you are writing form validation and error handling. The dopamine tap turns off, and you start browsing Product Hunt for your next idea.

This is the completion gap, and it is where the majority of side projects go to die. Not because the developer lacked skill or time, but because finishing requires a completely different set of muscles than starting.

If you have felt this pattern before, you are in good company. According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, the vast majority of developers work on side projects — but ask around any community and the completion rate hovers near zero. Indie Hackers community discussions confirm the same pattern: even prolific builders finish a fraction of what they start. I wrote about why developers never finish side projects in depth, and the responses made it clear: this is nearly universal.

The Psychology of Finishing

Starting a project activates the same brain chemistry as any novel experience. New framework, new idea, new possibilities. Your brain floods with dopamine. You are learning, exploring, and creating. It feels great.

Finishing a project is the opposite neurological experience. You are doing repetitive work. Fixing bugs in code you wrote last week. Building the boring parts you skipped earlier. The work is necessary but not novel, and your brain desperately wants to go find something new and interesting.

This is not a character flaw. It is how human brains work. We are wired to seek novelty and avoid repetition. The developers who finish projects consistently have not somehow rewired their brains. They have built systems that work despite this tendency.

Understanding this distinction matters. If you think finishing is a willpower problem, you will try to push through with discipline alone. That works sometimes, for some people, on some projects. But it is not reliable, and it is not sustainable.

If you treat finishing as a systems problem, you can design your workflow to make completion the path of least resistance. That is what we are going to talk about.

The Boring Middle

Every project has three phases. The beginning is exciting. The end is satisfying. The middle is boring.

The middle is where you write the CRUD endpoints that are not interesting but are necessary. Where you handle the edge cases. Where you build the settings page and the password reset flow and the email templates. Where the project feels like 60% done but the remaining 40% is the least fun 40%.

Most developers quit in the middle. They do not frame it as quitting, of course. They say they "lost interest" or "had a better idea" or "realized the market wasn't there." Sometimes those things are true. But often, they are rationalizations for the fact that the middle is unpleasant and a new project would feel better.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: the boring middle is where projects become real. Anyone can scaffold an app and get the happy path working. The developers who ship are the ones who push through the tedious parts.

So how do you survive the middle?

Strategy 1: Make the Project Smaller

The most effective way to finish more projects is to make each project smaller. This is obvious advice that almost nobody follows.

When I say smaller, I mean dramatically smaller than what you are probably imagining. Your v1 should have 3-5 features, not 15. It should take 2-3 weeks, not 3 months. It should solve one specific problem for one specific type of person.

Why does smaller work? Because the boring middle gets proportionally shorter. A 3-week project has maybe 4-5 days of boring middle. A 3-month project has weeks of it. The shorter the boring middle, the more likely you are to push through it.

This is not about building less ambitious products. It is about building ambitious products in smaller increments. Ship v1 in three weeks. Ship v1.1 two weeks later. Ship v1.2 after that. Each version is small enough to finish, and the cumulative result is a real product.

I know this is easier said than done. If you want practical techniques for reducing scope without gutting your product, how to stop abandoning side projects covers specific methods for making projects finishable.

Strategy 2: Lock Your Scope

Here is what happens to every developer mid-project. You are building feature A, and you think of feature B. Feature B is a great idea. It would make the product so much better. So you start building feature B. Halfway through feature B, you think of feature C. And now you have three half-built features and a project that is further from done than when you started.

The solution is to lock your scope. Decide what you are building, write it down, and then do not add anything new unless you have a compelling reason and you consciously decide to expand scope.

This sounds simple, but it requires real discipline because your brain will constantly generate "great ideas" for new features. And they probably are great ideas. The problem is not the quality of the ideas. The problem is that every new idea pushes your finish line further away.

Scope Locking was designed for exactly this problem. When you lock a feature list, adding anything new requires you to unlock it, which means writing down why you are changing scope. That small amount of friction is surprisingly effective. It forces you to distinguish between "this is a good idea" and "this needs to be in v1."

The features you cut do not disappear. Put them in a v1.1 list. They will be there when you finish and ship v1. But right now, they are distractions.

Strategy 3: Make Progress Visible

One reason the boring middle feels so demoralizing is that progress becomes invisible. In the first week, you went from nothing to a working prototype. Progress was obvious and exciting. In week three, you fixed 12 bugs and added error handling to 8 endpoints. The app looks the same. It feels like you did nothing.

You need a way to make that progress visible to yourself.

This can be as simple as a checklist. Write down every task that needs to happen before shipping. Check them off as you complete them. Watching the percentage climb from 60% to 70% to 80% provides a sense of forward motion that is otherwise missing.

Some developers use commit streaks. Some use a daily log. Some track hours. The specific method matters less than the habit of measuring and recording your progress.

Shame History takes a different approach. It creates a permanent record of every time you change your scope, which means you can see exactly how the project evolved. When you are tempted to add more features in the boring middle, looking at your history of scope changes is a good reality check.

Strategy 4: Work on a Schedule

"I'll work on it when I feel like it" is a guarantee that you will stop working on it within two weeks. Motivation is a launch fuel, not a sustaining fuel. It gets you started but it does not keep you going.

The developers who finish projects work on them on a schedule. Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Saturday mornings. One hour before work every day. The specific schedule does not matter. What matters is that the schedule exists and you follow it regardless of how you feel.

This is boring advice. I know. But it works because it removes the daily decision of "should I work on this today?" That decision, repeated every day, drains willpower. When the answer is always "yes, because it's Tuesday," you eliminate that friction.

Treat your side project like a class you signed up for. You would not skip a class because you were not in the mood. Apply the same standard to your project.

Strategy 5: Tell Someone

Accountability is a powerful finishing tool, and solo developers have almost none of it by default. Nobody at your company cares if your side project ships. Your friends probably do not understand what you are building. There is no standup meeting, no sprint review, no deadline.

So create your own accountability. Tell someone what you are building and when you plan to ship it. Post about your progress publicly. Join a community of builders. Find one person who will ask you "did you ship it yet?" next week.

The fear of disappointing someone else is, honestly, a better motivator than the desire to succeed. That sounds cynical, but it is true for most people. Use it.

I wrote about this more in how to stay accountable as a solo developer. There are specific tactics there beyond "tell a friend."

Strategy 6: Identify Your Quitting Patterns

Everyone has patterns around when and why they quit projects. Mine was always around the 3-week mark, when the initial excitement wore off and the remaining work felt tedious. Recognizing that pattern was the first step to beating it.

Look at your abandoned projects. When did you stop working on each one? Was it at the same phase? The same type of work? After the same amount of time?

Common quitting triggers:

• The first time something is genuinely hard to implement
• When you realize you need to build "boring" features like auth or settings
• When a shiny new idea appears
• When you get your first negative feedback
• When you compare your project to an established competitor

Once you know your trigger, you can prepare for it. If you always quit at week 3, schedule something rewarding at week 3. If you quit when a new idea appears, write the idea down and explicitly commit to not starting it until this project ships.

The Finishing Habit

Finishing is a habit, which means it gets easier with repetition. Your first shipped project will feel like dragging yourself across a finish line. Your fifth will feel routine.

If you have never finished a side project, start with something absurdly small. A single-page tool that does one thing. A browser extension. A CLI script. Something you can build and ship in a weekend.

The goal is not to build something impressive. The goal is to practice the entire arc: idea, scope, build, deploy, ship, tell people. That full cycle is the muscle you need to develop.

Once you have shipped something small, ship something slightly bigger. Then something slightly bigger than that. You are training your brain that projects have endings, that shipping is normal, that the boring middle is temporary.

Ship or Kill: No Middle Ground

Here is a rule that changes the dynamic: every project ends in one of two states. Shipped or killed. Never "paused." Never "on hold." Never "I'll get back to it."

"In progress" is the most dangerous state a side project can be in. It means you have not committed to finishing and have not committed to stopping. Limbo is where projects slowly die, whispering "you should work on me" every time you open GitHub.

If the project is worth building, ship it. Cut scope if you have to. Ship the ugly version. Ship the version with bugs. But ship. If it is not worth building, kill it deliberately. Either way, make a decision.

When to Actually Quit

Not every project deserves to be finished. Sometimes you start building something and discover the idea is bad. Sometimes your life changes and the project no longer makes sense. Sometimes you learn enough from the process that finishing is unnecessary.

The difference between healthy quitting and habitual quitting is intentionality. Healthy quitting is a conscious decision based on new information. Habitual quitting is an emotional reaction to discomfort.

Ask yourself: "Am I quitting because this project is wrong for me, or because this phase of the project is boring?" If it is the former, quit with confidence. If it is the latter, push through.

A good test: would you start this same project today, knowing what you know now? If yes, keep going. If no, quit and move on.

The Compound Effect of Finishing

Here is something nobody tells you about finishing side projects: the returns compound. Your first shipped project teaches you how to scope. Your second teaches you how to push through the middle. Your third ships in half the time because you have built the instincts.

After five shipped projects, you have a portfolio. After ten, you have a reputation. After twenty, you have the skills and judgment that most developers never develop because they spend their time starting instead of finishing.

Every shipped project, no matter how small, is more impressive than an unfinished masterpiece. A live product with 3 users beats a local prototype with 50 features. The world rewards shipped work, not planned work.

So pick one project. Cut the scope. Lock the features. Set a deadline. And finish it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why can't I finish my side projects?

Most developers struggle to finish because they define the project too broadly, lose motivation in the boring middle phase, or keep expanding scope. The problem is almost never technical ability. It is scope management and emotional endurance.

How do I stay motivated to finish a side project?

Do not rely on motivation. Set up systems that make progress visible, lock your scope so you cannot endlessly expand the project, and work on it at a consistent time each day. Motivation fades. Habits and constraints do not.

What is the best way to reduce scope on a side project?

Write down every feature you plan to build. Ask yourself which single feature delivers the most value. Build that one first. Move everything else to a later version list. If you cannot cut a feature without losing the core value, keep it. Otherwise, cut it.

Should I work on multiple side projects at once?

No. Working on multiple projects at once is the fastest way to finish none of them. Pick one, commit to it, and do not start another until this one ships. Sequential focus beats parallel dabbling every time.

How small should my side project scope be?

Small enough that you can ship it in 2-4 weeks working part-time. If your project requires more than 5-7 features for a first version, it is too big. Cut until it feels almost too simple. You can always add features after launching.