Over the last 29 years, I have worked on many, many projects that did not come to fruition. For most of that time I didn't make any special effort to retain my unfinished work.
In this respect , I think perhaps I was like many hobbyists (and Indies.) I flitted from idea to idea, playing around until it wasn't fun any more. Most of these projects still live on as forgotten files on dusty old hard-drives I keep in a pile in my office closet.
Relatively recently (starting in about 2002) I began retaining every unfinished project. I created a repository for these dead and dieing projects on my data drive in a directory simply labeled 'graveyard'. After that, every time I wrote a piece of code, made a piece of art, or created a document and then failed to use it, the entire project got moved to 'The Graveyard'.
Today, the graveyard contains hundreds (maybe thousands) of unfinished projects, unused assets, and various other pieces of cruft. In total about 200GB of files (mostly compressed) are buried there.
As the title of this blog implies, I've started to dig through this content. Perhaps, the only result will be a bit of reminiscing, but my goal is to find things that meet the following criteria:
- Finish-able projects - I hope to find something that can be polished off and put to use. (A lot of these projects are pretty functional, but were abandoned for lack of time, art, interest, etc.)
- Inspiring - I am also looking for inspiration. Perhaps a project will be too out-of-date to be useful in its current form, but still be good enough to inspire a 'remake'.
Like I said above, I can't be unique in my failure to finish projects, but I wonder how many other folks out there keep all their unfinished work. I also wonder, for those that do keep stuff, how they organize it.
So, if you are reading this and you do retain unfinished projects, please comment and tell me about your system. I'd love to find a better way of organizing this crud. My method is pretty ad hoc, mostly direct copies followed by a compress.
So, if you are reading this and you do retain unfinished projects, please comment and tell me about your system. I'd love to find a better way of organizing this crud. My method is pretty ad hoc, mostly direct copies followed by a compress.