I tend to stop working on programs before they are fit to be released. It's not that I abandon them, but it's just that often a program will reach the stage where it's good enough for my purposes and I don't feel like I personally would benefit from the additional work needed to make it releasable.
I'm kind of that way now with a new utility. I could easily hardcode my specific use case now and be done with it. Or I could add a UI to make it more generally useful, but at the cost of a tonne of extra work.
I'm not sure if that's the type of thing you're talking about?-Eóin (January 10, 2011, 09:16 AM)
Trust me, the best reward and the biggest kick is getting a nice thank you email when you have made a difference for someone you've never met, that and looking at the number of downloads when things start getting noticed, think at the moment I'm up to just over quarter of a million downloads worldwide.-kip (January 10, 2011, 04:37 PM)
Now in fairness most of these are incomplete and just not worth finishing. But some are fully functional and just are too specialized and hard to use, such that releasing them would just cause frustration from people who tried to use them :)-mouser (January 10, 2011, 12:41 PM)
It's really amazing how much extra work is required to get a program that you wrote for yourself, or as a prototype, into a state where it is suitable for release to the public.
I probably have a dozen such apps -- some small, some large, most of which i've thought of finishing up and polishing off and releasing but just can't get the energy to do. Now in fairness most of these are incomplete and just not worth finishing. But some are fully functional and just are too specialized and hard to use, such that releasing them would just cause frustration from people who tried to use them :)-mouser (January 10, 2011, 12:41 PM)
that's being a bit hard on yourself i think
But then, most likely, there are some gems, hidden in the debris
...
One of those gems, I'm discovering as I finally have reached what I'd call an intermediate skill level in my programming, is that I'm consolidating useful chunks of code into my own private namespaces for re-use. Quite handy.-kyrathaba (January 13, 2011, 03:29 PM)