

Ask HN: What's the longest you've worked on a side project, without finishing? - nsheth17

This guy&#x27;s been working on his for 9 years. I doubt that&#x27;s the longest though. What&#x27;s your record? (Mine&#x27;s 2 years and counting)<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;webdev&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3fftyw&#x2F;why_side_projects_die_and_an_idea_to_finish_more&#x2F;ctoc4bh
======
daly
15 years...axiom-developer.org

Of course the project has a "30 year horizon" so ....

~~~
nsheth17
> _Axiom has been in development since 1971. At that time, it was called
> Scratchpad._

So actually 44 years??

~~~
daly
Actually yes. I'm one of the original authors. But it has only been an open
source side project since 2000.

------
sideproject
Mine's are still going. :) One for 2.5 years, another for 2. I don't think
I'll stop any time though, I've gotten into this groove of doing small bits
each day.

------
usermac
In my 28-year career I've noted that if a project has not been fielded 2 years
after its announcement, it fails.

------
davelnewton
Years :(

------
mindcrime
I've been working on my side project startup for quite some time, depending on
how exactly you define when it began. Some of the _ideas_ date back to around
2006 or so. But that was really a different project, but it definitely
influenced the current project. But none of the code from back then is still
in use.

More realistically, the current project really started sometime in 2010, best
as I can remember. The earliest bug in the issue tracker is dated 12 Jul 2010,
and the earliest commit in the old SVN repo is dated Wed, 07 Jul 2010. And the
oldest entry on the "news" page of our website is also 07-12-2010. The domain
name was registered 03-apr-2005, but that's only because I thought of the
name, thought "hey, that might be useful one day" and registered it and sat on
it until I needed a name/domain for something. The legal entity was officially
created on 6/2/2009, but even that's not completely indicative of reality, as
I formed the legal entity originally with the plan to be a one man consulting
company... but I never really did any consulting at the time, and later when I
wanted to do a product based company, I just re-purposed the name/domain.

And that's the history of Fogbeam Labs in far too many words...

As far as finishing... well, it'll never be _finished_ , like fashion's never
finished. :-) That said, we have issued releases of our open source projects,
and from a commercial standpoint we have two products that have been in
"Limited Availability" status for a while. So we have something you can
consider shipping, but we don't think we're anywhere near done.

