DevConf.cz 2021

Many developers have pet projects. It can be that little tool that you use daily. Or it can be something a bit larger, something that you secretly (or not so secretly) hope will become big at some point in a vague future. In this session, I will not talk about your pet projects, however. I will talk about mine. This means that I will mostly talk about *failed* pet projects, some seemingly insane efforts that never went anywhere, but that I keep hammering on relentlessly. You think you have problems with your pet projects? Wait until you see mine ;-) For sanity, I will of course contrast that with more successful open-source pet projects.

Now, why would failures be interesting? Survivor bias. By looking only at successful projects, we fail to learn about all the things that can cause a project to fail, stall, choke or wither. On the other hand, failure is still the best teacher. The more you fail, the more you have learned. I also want developers, notably younger ones, to own the phrase "When you fail, redefine success". I want to highlight, through my own experience, how failure is always relative. I want to explain why I am proud of my failures as much as of my successes. I want to encourage every one of you to dream big and fail big. I want you to dream that you are Einstein, even if in the end, it turns out that like me you are closer to Frank than Albert.

I will illustrate this talk with the four following pet projects of mine: XL, Tao3D, make-it-quick and the flight recorder library. And I will complement that analysis of failures by contrasting with three pet projects I consider successes: git publish, bichon and qboot. By exploring these various projects, how they grew a community (or not), their code size, their purpose, how easy it is to maintain and develop them. and more, I hope to give you some interesting data points for your own future pet project.

My conclusion here: It is OK to fall in love with your monster, as long as you do it intentionally.

Presentatio: https://github.com/c3d/presentations/blob/DevConf.cz-2021-PetProjects/README.md