Comment by tppiotrowski
2 years ago
Is your motivation validation or learning? If it's learning, each day will be a win...even if your user metrics are trending downwards. If it's validation, your motivation will fluctuate with your traffic patterns.
Some projects are purely experimental, while some carry the hope that they can be monetized. My point is that I have a habit of abandoning hobbies, books, writing draft, and side-projects altogether thinking my motivation for them has been lost. I don't believe one should force themselves to finish things, but lost motivation is sometimes temporary or a sign of picking up not-so-good ideas. Realizing that and figuring out ways to sustain motivation is an important meta-skill.
I don't know what you mean by "validation" though. Do you just mean praise?
What if you just want to make some friends in open source? Truth is I've programming alone for over a decade. Loneliness is a crushing feeling, it feels like nothing matters and that everything is pointless. Recently people started generally interacting with my projects: creating issues, emailing me, I even received my vert first pull request. It feels really amazing, a very welcome change and also extremely motivating. Not sure if I'd call it "validation" though.