On shipping side projects instead of polishing them forever

Most side projects don't fail because the idea was bad — they fail because they never leave the "almost done" state. The last ten percent quietly expands to fill however much time you're willing to give it.

The rule that's worked for me: ship the thing that's embarrassing, not the thing that's finished. A live demo with a rough edge beats a polished repo nobody can try.

Vocation, the academic-pathway planner listed on the projects page above, went from idea to a deployed hackathon build in about a day. It's not finished. It's live, and that turned out to matter more.