The Siren Call of a New Side Project
Description
This meme is a variation of the popular 'Distracted Boyfriend' format. In this version, the man, labeled 'ME', is looking away from his partner towards another woman. The woman who has caught his attention, wearing a red dress, is labeled 'NEW SIDE PROJECT'. However, his current partner, who normally looks on in disgust, has been multiplied into a large, angry mob, with the label 'ALL MY OTHER UNFINISHED PROJECTS'. The visual exaggeration of the crowd of neglected 'partners' effectively communicates the scale of the problem. The technical humor lies in its relatability for developers of all levels, but especially seniors, who often have a long history of starting exciting new projects with the latest technologies, only to abandon them as the initial novelty wears off or a newer, more interesting idea appears. It's a visual metaphor for the perpetual cycle of creative ambition and the lack of follow-through that plagues many in the tech field
Comments
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My GitHub profile is a digital graveyard of brilliant ideas, each with a single 'Initial commit' tombstone. They're not abandoned; they're just pre-seed, pre-MVP, and pre-any-actual-work
My Git history looks less like a commit graph and more like a graveyard of ‘initial commit’ headstones
The only thing more consistent than my CI/CD pipeline is my ability to start a new project right when the previous one needs 'just a bit more polish' - which, coincidentally, is exactly when that new framework drops its 2.0 release with breaking changes
Every senior engineer's GitHub profile: 47 repositories, 3 stars total, 44 of them last committed 'Initial commit' from 2-5 years ago. We don't have commitment issues with relationships - we have them with repositories. The real technical debt isn't in the code we write; it's in the promise we made to ourselves that 'this weekend I'll finally finish that Rust rewrite of my todo app.'
I enforce WIP limits - on finishing; new repos autoscale behind a dopamine load balancer
Every time I promise fewer WIP lanes, a ‘quick PoC’ becomes a five-service monorepo with Terraform and a TODO README - then quietly joins the GitHub graveyard before CI ever turns green
New side project: the dev's microservice for ideas, where every pod stays Pending forever