Do you have ever experienced where:
- You have an idea
- You design it, choose core features that you want for it
- Start the project
- As you work, the project goes messier and messier, and also more complicated than you though, and then eventually you have done with it
- You abandoned the project and move on

I experienced it quite often. And I haven't had a finished project since quite a long time ago.

Maybe I should scale it down.

After I learned to architect prior to implementation and stick to the specs, no. Projects get finished, maybe not in one go, but they do. I also almost always do at least two implementations, as it seems to improve both the designs and the implementations, as it forces me to be more thorough in my design.

I know, specs written before starting any implementation are tentative at best, especially when working with something relatively new to yourself. However, making it a practice to stick to the specs makes altering them a conscious effort and in my personal experience mitigates - combined with the fact of having to make changes to two implementations at least - the rise of enthropy within the project.

I do recommend reading Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month, the 20th anniversary edition from 1995. I learned a lot of what makes me efficient in my pet projects from that book. It does require some deciphering and self-reflection so as to be able to apply what is essentially meant as guidelines for managing large software projects to the self-management of one-person software development efforts. Doing that pays dividents, however.

@100110111
Before I was dev
I misheard that book’s title:
“Mythical Man Moth”

I had just believed
It was a whimsical name
Inspired by Kafka

The only times when a project gets abandoned are when I realise there is a major fallacy on either the idea or the grand design level. If it’s the idea that is faulty, I abandon the project by default. There’s no point in trying to rethink it. If it’s on the design level and I’d basically have to scrap the whole of the earlier design and start anew, whether I proceed to do that depends on how invested I am into the project. Sometimes I just cannot be bothered to throw one away only to start anew. That’s when projects get abandoned.

@AmyShackles
The haikus are nice and all
but you misspelled "month"

see what I did there?