I wish I could shift my thinking to do this. I've been a web developer for 17 years and love programming. But any time I've tried to build my own projects or products, it's usually a revamp of an existing product or game, and I quickly lose interest.
I lack the ability to see everyday "issues" that could be resolved with programming. But if someone asks me to solve an issue with a program, I could probably come up with something pretty quickly.
Curious if anyone else has this problem, or have found a way out of it?
In fact, I'm not sure how to decide if something actually IS finished. Sometimes I just want to understand something, and when I get to that point, I call it done. I just like to learn.
Like with my FM synths: I made a TX802 clone a long time ago (in software), and once I got to a certain point I was like, "Yep, got it." I just wanted to construct something that could implement the FM algorithms and a filter. That's all. I could have made a fully-fledged MIDI synth, but I just wanted to understand synthesis. Or with ray tracing: once I got spheres, cubes, transparency, and reflections and a simple scene text-file syntax, I was like: I should add NURBS, but that was way too complicated, so I called that "done" because I understood how it worked.
You can ALWAYS keep going. Nothing is ever really done. When you lose interest, that's just your brain saying, "I learned enough, let's do something else!" Think of your brain on hobbies like a Golden Retriever: short attention span but always happy!
That's not a bad outlook and I had never thought of it that way. Even if I don't finish the project, at least I'm actively coding and having fun. Thanks!
If you don't need/want it yourself, and no one's paying you to do it, yes, you'll lose interest. I don't have your problem; I reach for code as a solution pretty quickly. Probably key is I'm not trying to "finish" personal projects or make a product, just doing as much as I need at the time.
Since you know web development, maybe install TamperMonkey and start "fixing" or improving websites you use regularly. You can often make a significant difference to your experience with a few lines of code written in a few minutes (changing/adding CSS rules, making links visible instead of hidden in dropdown menus, reordering/recolouring things, presenting information in a more sensible way, adding shortcut keys, converting static tables to DataTables, etc.). Over time some of my user scripts have grown to many hundreds of lines, and even been adapted to be essential components of workflows of me and my colleagues. They make my job/life easier dozens of times a day.
(Most of these are for internal websites or idiosyncratic to my needs, so there's no point in sharing them.)
You're probably going for things that are too large in terms of scope and/or scale and don't really solve any need for yourself. Think about bite-sized problems that will help you with your day to day work/hobbies and don't try to solve them in an 'enterprisey' or bullet-proof way... think the simplest thing that can possibly work. Then over time, start getting more ambitious. It doesn't matter if it only works for 2% of cases (as long as it's the 2% you care about), runs slowly, is a memory hog, crashes every 8th time you run it or any number of other things you'd never dare do for 'production' code. Assume it's a throwaway project and then be pleasantly surprised if it isn't.
The way out for people like you and me is to realize that most problems don’t need to be solved with software. When you find an effective solution that doesn’t involve code or computers at all, you can congratulate yourself.
Working on self-directed projects didn't come naturally to me either and I had to learn how to get over this motivation issue.
It's taken me 10 years of working on side projects to finally be able to figure out which things I will actually finish vs. which ones I just like the idea of and will invariably give up on. It's some combination of what do I think is useful to myself or others, what can I turn into a small prototype in a short amount of time, and what can I actually accomplish in a short time [1].
Accountability was important for me to launch three side projects in the last year. I declared to my friends on New Years that I was going to make and launch a game that I had designed within that year. I kind of entangled my desire to finish projects with my desire to follow through with what I commit to.
I didn't actually finish it in that year, I finished it in January of this year, but I tried! I set it down a lot and ended up getting stuck multiple times. Probably because of that pesky day-job and regular life. My friend asked me if I had launched, and that caused me to put in a final weeklong sprint and launch it. If I knew how close I was to finishing I would have finished it months earlier. I ended up simplifying a lot of code in the first few days of that last sprint and all of a sudden finishing seemed possible.
Because I devoted myself to launching that one game, I have since been creating more and more things and launching them or getting them to a stage where they're generally useful.
In my case, having the confidence from finishing one project made it easier to start newer projects because I knew whether I could finish them based on my past success.
>>> I lack the ability to see everyday "issues" that could be resolved with programming.
Almost every idea that I have could initially be conceptualized as a revamp of an existing product or game, but I'm super excited about them because they're my revamp that I'll gain a skill from and will help me to work on more complicated things later.
I take notes whenever I have an idea and will expand on ideas that I'm still interested in later. I basically use the snowflake method, creating more elaborate detail about the ideas I'm most interested in. Sometimes they evolve a lot after expanding on them too.
Honestly 99% of my ideas are terrible, so I trained myself to try to write down every idea that I have and then later on when I'm itching to start a new project I can decide whether it's a project that I will actually finish vs. ones I just like the idea of.
I don’t see it in the Dutch iOS App Store. You should add it there (most people speak perfect English here so you don’t need to worry about translations).
I lack the ability to see everyday "issues" that could be resolved with programming. But if someone asks me to solve an issue with a program, I could probably come up with something pretty quickly.
Curious if anyone else has this problem, or have found a way out of it?