Side projects Memes

Nothing says "I'm totally over it" quite like spending 6 months of your life building a competing product out of pure spite. Got ghosted by your dream company? No problem! Just casually architect an entire open-source alternative that threatens their market share. The ultimate power move: turning rejection into a GitHub repo with 50k stars while they're stuck maintaining their legacy codebase. Who needs therapy when you can channel all that emotional damage into disrupting an entire industry? The villain origin story we all secretly fantasize about.

Nothing says "I have my life together" quite like enthusiastically grabbing a shiny new project while standing on a mountain of abandoned repos. The excited kid reaching for the new project while literally drowning in unfinished work? That's not a meme, that's a documentary. You know what's wild? We convince ourselves this time will be different. This new framework, this side project, this rewrite—it's gonna be THE ONE. Meanwhile, your GitHub is a graveyard of "TODO: Add tests" commits from 2019. But hey, that new JavaScript framework that just dropped looks really promising, right? The real skill isn't finishing projects—it's justifying why starting another one is actually a strategic career move. "I'm learning the ecosystem," you say, as your 47th tutorial project joins the others in the void.

Learning a new language or framework is that satisfying climb up the stairs—steady progress, dopamine hits with each concept mastered, Stack Overflow bookmarks multiplying. Then you take a two-week vacation, switch projects, or just look at production fires for a month straight. Suddenly you're staring at your own code like it's written in ancient Sumerian. The forgetting curve is real and it's exponential. The only prevention? Build useless side projects you'll never finish. It's not procrastination, it's spaced repetition.

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.