Since this whole week is an official holiday in the country (Egypt) and I got nothing to share, I thought I’d write this post about basically nothing! Seriously, I would like to talk about the current state of my side projects.

I have been getting myself into multiple side projects and plans (in the back of my head), however, I reached a point where I don’t want to work on them anymore. I work on my projects to a half-baked state and then I lose the motivation to continue them (side projects, right?). For example, I started a blog post that I wanted to publish more than three months ago, and to this day, I haven’t finished it yet. The main issue is, you get this itch that there’s always something that you should be doing and yet, you’re not!

This may seem like a state of burnout (and it could be) but I don’t think it is (since it’s not my first encounter with burnout). I believe I was on the edge of burnout (from work) a few weeks ago and I took some time off after talking with my colleagues at Swvl ❤️ and everything was fine afterwards.

I think the issue is I have been hustling more than the usual and I got a case of programmer’s block. Programmer’s block is stolen from writer’s block, of course, and it’s the state where the programmer’s mind totally freezes and stops thinking. This is what goes into my mind when I get into an infinite recursion and stare into my screen endlessly (do human brains have stack overflows?).

I found this blog post, The 4 Secrets to Successful Side Projects, by chance, while wanting to (let’s say) kill some time while also trying to find a solution to my block. It may sound like one of those cheesy posts from those (let’s say) “edgy” blogs with arbitrary numbers in the title but it actually contains some sound advice.

One of the points that I think inspired me to write this post is to talk about your projects with anyone who would listen. Although, this post is not about a specific project of mine. I believe this is to make sort of a commitment to other people when you share and talk about your projects. Anyway, I don’t think I work that way.

A great point the blog post made is to know that it’s okay to quit your project. I normally get too attached to my projects and start acting like a mad scientist which now, seems counter-productive to say the least. Also, the post talked about how important it is to have regular checks for your projects and evaluate their state and the value for you and whether it’s worthy to continue them or not.

Since I didn’t promise much from the beginning, I will end this post here. Tschüss!