Side projects Memes

Every open-source developer's existential crisis in three panels. You start thinking you're building something neat, maybe a fun little utility or a clever library. Then reality slaps you with the uncomfortable truth: someone's entire production stack will depend on this in 24 months, and you'll be maintaining it for free while they make millions. The FOSS lifecycle: "Cool side project" → "Wait, 50,000 downloads?" → "Oh god, I'm now responsible for global infrastructure and my only compensation is GitHub stars." Welcome to the beautiful nightmare where your weekend hobby becomes critical infrastructure for Fortune 500 companies who won't even sponsor your coffee fund.

Procrastination's final form: suddenly your half-baked side project becomes the most important thing in the universe when you've got a midterm in 48 hours. That TODO app you abandoned three months ago? Now it's calling your name louder than your Data Structures textbook ever could. Your brain will do Olympic-level mental gymnastics to avoid studying. "But I NEED to refactor this component right now" or "This bug has been bothering me for weeks" (it hasn't). Suddenly you're debugging at 2 AM, telling yourself it's still productive work, just... not the work you're supposed to be doing. The side project knows exactly when you're vulnerable. It's been sitting there dormant, but the moment academic pressure hits, it transforms into this irresistible siren song of TypeScript and Docker configs. Tale as old as time.

That abandoned side project sitting in your GitHub repos suddenly becomes the most fascinating thing you've ever built the moment your actual deadline starts breathing down your neck. Project A transforms from "meh, whatever" to "THIS IS MY MAGNUM OPUS" faster than you can say "git checkout." It's the developer's version of suddenly finding your room desperately needs organizing when you have an exam tomorrow. That half-baked todo app you haven't touched in 6 months? Suddenly needs a complete architecture overhaul RIGHT NOW. The documentation you've been ignoring? Critical priority. That refactoring you've been postponing? Can't possibly wait another minute. Your brain's procrastination engine running at maximum efficiency, convincing you that literally anything else is more important than the thing that's actually due. The quantum superposition of productivity collapses the moment you observe the deadline.

The eternal cycle of developer self-sabotage in one perfect image. There you are, desperately trying to stay afloat while surrounded by the drowning corpses of abandoned projects with names like "cool-api-v2", "learn-rust-weekend", and "definitely-finishing-this-one". But wait! Is that a shiny new project idea with its innocent little face? Better drop everything and reach for it! Those other projects weren't drowning fast enough anyway. The GitHub graveyard grows by one repo every time someone thinks "I'll just start this real quick and get back to my other stuff later." Narrator: They never got back to their other stuff later.