Committing to long term projects

Yesterday I started working on a new project that I was contemplating to start or not for a couple of months now. It was very hard to pull the trigger and finally start working on it for a couple of reasons. First, it is always hard to start something from a blank page, specifically when it comes to coding there are just so many ways to do things and I am always trying to find the best one, I research and I read to the point where I feel overwhelmed and feel like I don’t understand anything anymore and feel dumb because the is so much information and opinions on everything and it is hard to make sense of all of it.

The project I started working on is the UI web components library built with Lit. The second reason why I couldn’t decide if I should start it or not is because I knew it would take a lot of time, six months to a year, not even to finish but to take it to some first beta stage where it is useful to me. Also, I don’t think there will be much payoff for working on it. Some people may say that half a year to a year is not a big time commitment. To me, it is at this point in life and if you had asked me 10 years ago I would have told you that is a humongous amount of time and I would struggle to commit to anything for that long. But as I get older thank God my perception of time is changing. I think that happens to everyone, remember how long it felt to wait till your next birthday or school year as a kid, it felt like a decade.

I’m not saying that I haven’t worked on a project for that long, what I have never done is committed to it initially knowing it will take that long. Usually, I would think that the project would take less time and in the end, it always took much longer than I expected. And I’m talking about my private free time projects not day job projects because that is different.

One particular thing about this project is that the goal is not to make money but something I will build and have open source, although not sure if anybody will want it even for free. All of my other projects have always been for profit. So why even do it then? For the past year or two, I have been frustrated by all of the available UI component libraries and I have tried many of them but always found particular problems with all of them. It is hard to make them look the way I want and styling is very painful and nonintuitive. I just think there could be a better way to do it and it seems that no one has done it yet. I’m not 100% percent sure I can do it though and I’m not even sure that the problems I have faced with UI component libraries are something that other people think is a problem at all. But it bogs me so much and I am so frustrated with the currently available options that I feel I need to make something better or while building it realize that my assumptions were all wrong. Either way, it will get his nagging idea out of my head and I will be able to put it to rest. This idea has constantly been on my mind for months now and I can’t get rid of it. Also at the moment, I don’t have any other money-making project ideas so I may as well work on this one. Because at the end of the day even if I’m the only one to whom this project will be useful it still will be worthwhile.

It will probably take a couple of months of working on the project to understand if it is something useful and could work out. And when I say useful I mean useful to me, because although I think this is a problem that needs to be solved in reality I will only know it until I’m forty or fifty percent in.

If this doesn’t work out not all of my effort will go to waste. I still will improve my coding skills and can always add it to my portfolio of projects and it will benefit me when it comes to employment or getting a better-paid position. However, that is not my current goal. I want to build a business but I’m just burned down from all of the previous failures and don’t have any ideas for new projects.

I couldn’t get myself to commit to doing it, but then this thought came to my mind, that maybe because of this resistance, it is a good project to take on. For once all the easy stuff gets picked up first, so it is very hard to find something that is easy and fast to do that will work out, probably if would had been easy and fast somebody would have already done it. Of course, an argument always could be made that you discovered something new or will get lucky but odds against such outcomes are pretty low. In a way, it is a good signal that something is difficult to do because all the reasons that you do not want to do are the same reasons nobody else has done it yet.

When it comes to new projects there are many types of difficulties. In this particular case for me, the time investment required and the lack of potential reward were the biggest hurdles. But somehow I have come to this idea that the more time it takes to do it the more potential there is. In the past, I have been limited to working on ideas that I thought wouldn’t take a lot of time, but that seems to be a very limiting factor that influences what kinds of projects I work on and the results.

I will write an update about this project in a couple of months. It will be interesting to see if my thoughts have changed after a couple of months in the trenches. But for now, I’m happy to see that I’m not as afraid anymore of longer time commitments but look at it as a positive indication that it is something worthwhile to be working on.