Shiny Object Syndrome: The Unfinished Project's Lament
Description
This image is a multi-layered version of the popular 'Distracted Boyfriend' meme, tailored to a developer's experience. The boyfriend, labeled 'ME', is looking back at a woman in a red dress, labeled 'Unity Game development'. His current partner, looking on in disgust, is labeled 'Unfinished Flutter App'. The background, which is normally a generic crowd, is filled with numerous copies of the girlfriend's disapproving face, each labeled with a different enticing skill or technology. These labels include 'Blender 3D', '2D Digital art', 'Svelte.js', 'Character drawing', 'Drawing', 'DevOps', 'Maya 3d', 'React Native', 'Logo design', 'Graphic Design', 'Figma', 'AI', and 'Blockchain'. The meme humorously captures the common developer trait of 'shiny object syndrome' - the tendency to get excited and start new projects with new technologies before finishing existing ones. For senior engineers, it's a deeply relatable scenario reflecting a career-long accumulation of abandoned side-projects and the constant, often distracting, lure of learning the next big thing
Comments
7Comment deleted
My GitHub is just a graveyard of ambitious ideas, each with a beautifully crafted README and a 'last commit' date that screams 'ooh, shiny!'
Stand-up update: “Flutter app’s still 80% done, but on the bright side I accidentally built a multithreaded ECS in Unity - so velocity is unchanged, just vector-rotated.”
My GitHub contribution graph looks like a QR code that redirects to my therapist's booking page
The real Unity here is how we've all unified around the shared experience of having seventeen half-finished projects in different frameworks while convincing ourselves that *this* new technology will finally be the one we actually ship. Spoiler: that Flutter app is still waiting for its first production deployment, right next to your Electron prototype from 2019 and that 'weekend project' Rust rewrite that's now in its third year
My focus obeys the CAP theorem: always sacrifices consistency on the Flutter MVP for availability of Unity prototypes
Promised the PM I'd wrap the Flutter app this sprint; opened Unity for a '10-minute spike' - six hours, three Asset Store purchases, and a 7GB repo later, I'm benchmarking draw calls
Unity fires up IL2CPP and reimports everything, so I open a “weekend” Flutter app for the hot‑reload dopamine - right up until provisioning profiles and plugin hell promote it to a permanent PoC