How do you guys motivate yourself to finish private side projects?
This is merely a rant about my incompetence to stay motivated until I finished a project just for and by myself... Most of the time I start coding until I figured out how it works and then mostly never touch it again. And this is fucking silly

Simply, I don't. I have it the same way as you. I quickly loose interest in the project, when I feel I have learned what I did the project for.

At first I just wanted to continue, but now I have learnt. That if a project just was for fun and education, there is no problem in throwing it away to start something new, I can learn a lot from.

@Doehl but somehow I want to have something to show to other people :D

And when I read here from people who fix things in old side projects because they are bored ... I feel bad ... I can't even fix something because I never finished side projects

@filax Sounds like you found the biggest bug 😉

@psudo I'm on something at the moment, and this time I really want to finish it. I want to build up know how and kind of a portfolio to maybe get side projects for smaller customers

We are many that scale the wall competence by climbing on abandoned projects ;)

But once in a while it is nice to finish one :)

@Voxera thanks for that, I like it :)
I somehow have to stay motivated this time

@filax try writing down a list of remaining things todo.

Getting to tick then of can help with motivation.

Also rank them in importance.

Finally, try to get it to at least partially work. I find that it often is easier once you get to play with it for real.

@Voxera that's what I did this time. But I'm not sure how small the tasks should be when I split it up :)

@filax start with overall goals. Pick the most important and subdivide and start ticking them of.

If the small points left are less important, pick next big point.

Anotjer trick is to brag about it to someone you care about. That makes the stakes higher. But it could backfire.

@Voxera thank you!

I suffer from the same problem, there are many hobby projects that I want to do but I never finish anything.
The first thing you can do is limit the scope of the project. Keep it small and manageable, so there is actually a remote chance you finish it.

Secondly, try to do at least one commit a day, however small. This is a hint I read here on DevRant, and I'm currently trying it out. It appears to be working thus far. I think that the reason this might work is that it keeps your mind on the project, even if you don't actually do much work. It prevents you from forgetting about the project. GitHub's little yellow squares definitely help gamify the process.

My biggest hurdle is mostly losing interest tho and then when you return, having no clue about what to do and just reinforcing the lack of interest..

I somewhat get around it by writing descriptive tests first, then when I run my test suite, I can easily scope something I want to do and get working on it.. :)

Also implementing some shiny new thing and way to get things done helps getting the ball rolling.. A bit Variety :)

What I do is create short milestones and as soon as I complete one I show the progress to some friends or in a Dev group. In this way you can get feedback and get some interest in the project.

The only ones I make are the ones I actually want to use. They solve a personal problem or annoyance like checking websites for updates new comics, getting the current commute to so I can decide whether to WFH if there looks like a traffic jam, tracking home many books I've read or anime I've watched....

Plus sometimes I just want to try a new language.

Granted some of my ideas felt good but after coding for a while I lost interest so never finished.

Find yourself a colleague or a fellow programmer who likes the project and would like to contribute, make some arrangements as to brainstorm once a day and prototype few times a week. But use a schedule. As it moves forward faster you won't loose interest and when you grow it up enough you will start making plans on how to go big, than you simply wouldn't be able to stop until you either go full time in it or it completely fails. But remember schedules and constant contributions.

Thanks for all the input! I really appreciate it :)
Today I spent some time sorting out what i want to do with my little learning project.
In the end I managed to get a priorized todo list and some goals I want to reach with my project.

If someone is really interested, here is the github link:
https://github.com/areiterer/...

But I have to warn you all, I am still learning JavaScript, GIT and web development topics (few years of C# development experience though).