> This projects do have their advantages as I discover new ways to do things that are very beneficial to my work projects but for my personal projects and personal life they are a dead end.
Absolutely I experience this and I expect most programmers have a few half baked or in-progress projects laying around.
You are focusing on the wrong aspect (the half done part) and not on the very beneficial part - learning for future projects. Keep those half done projects organized and in version control so that you can come back to them later. Better yet, license them all as BSD and put them in a public repo. Then if you need them for work 1) they can't be exclusively co-opted by a company even if they are used there (after all you built them on your own time) and 2) others can learn and contribute.
If you are definitely not coming back to them be sure to tag them as abandonware so people aren't expecting bug fixes.
Absolutely I experience this and I expect most programmers have a few half baked or in-progress projects laying around.
You are focusing on the wrong aspect (the half done part) and not on the very beneficial part - learning for future projects. Keep those half done projects organized and in version control so that you can come back to them later. Better yet, license them all as BSD and put them in a public repo. Then if you need them for work 1) they can't be exclusively co-opted by a company even if they are used there (after all you built them on your own time) and 2) others can learn and contribute.
If you are definitely not coming back to them be sure to tag them as abandonware so people aren't expecting bug fixes.