I have worked on various side projects involving design, development, music, etc. over time and generally kept the remnants living on somewhere (DropBox folders, word docs, random repositories). I like to have reference for nostalgia or to reflect on the lessons learned before my next pursuit. Recently, I have been considering creating a blog or documenting the key parts like screenshots along with a write up recap in an Archive folder somewhere and then purging the content such as code, mockups, assets, etc. I would partially like to write a post-mortem about a side startup but the rest are not as valued.
I was just curious if you have any personal examples or practices for closing out your cancelled or completed projects (Archive - Purge - Blog Post - Open Source - viking send-off)?
Why? I would never destroy anything I'd created like that. Unless you're doing it for some sort of closure, the way people throw things into the ocean in books and movies, I don't see the benefit. On the con side, you never know when you might start it back up, or just have some use for it. More than once I've gone back to a project I hadn't touched in years and either used it again (e.g. a "one-off" utility script), or just copied pieces of it to use in something current.
I think open sourcing something you're done with (that wasn't already open source) is a great idea in general.