
Ask HN: What to do when a project is "finished"? - franciscop
I now consider an open source project I did, Umbrella JS [1], is &quot;finished&quot;. By this I mean it has everything I wanted it to have, it&#x27;s tested extensively* and documented heavily* .<p>My initial idea for the project was to use it myself and now I&#x27;m doing it and I love it. However I have a strong feeling that &quot;I should keep improving it&quot;, but at the same time I think that this feeling is what makes projects become bloatware and too big&#x2F;complex for their own good, which happened to me before [2].<p>The main thing is that if some people happen to find the project, I don&#x27;t want them to think it&#x27;s a &quot;dead project&quot;. For sure I&#x27;ll fix small (or big) bug reports and maintain it, but I expect the needed work in this aspect to be minimal.<p>So, what can I do now that this project is finished? Just leave it as it is or do you recommend other course of action? I can think getting more people using it might reveal bugs quicker (I don&#x27;t mind if many or few people use it <i>per se</i>, but less bugs for sure is better).<p>Is this feeling of &quot;I should keep making more things&quot; normal after finishing a big-ish project? What do other people do in this situation?<p>[1] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;umbrellajs.com&#x2F; (when is a project finished?)
[2] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;picnicss.com&#x2F; (too many &quot;broken features&quot;)<p>*at least for a 1-person project
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brudgers
If a project is still fixing bugs, maybe "maintenance mode" is a better
description than "finished". On the grand scale, there are "well known"
projects that have gone more than a decade between releases: e.g.
Enlightenment [1].

One of the things I think Clojure has done right is finishing things.
Continuously changing a dependency [which is one aspect of all software] makes
work for people relying on it downstream.

Good luck.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_\(software\))

