I started a created a company in 1995 to do web stuff for a very niche market – I guess now it would be called SaaS. It never really completed or became a money-maker, but it’s out there and I still work on it.

First I had problems with IP theft – I had lots of original photos that people took. Then datasets and articles I had written were copied, so I focused on trying to stop that. Then I found myself spending too much time trying to deal with SEO, then x, then y… It was always a game of wackamole, trying to figure out how to keep ahead.

Throw in the ebb and flow of life’s challenges and it always seems like time, money, health, or some combination thereof seemed to come up at just the wrong time (is there ever a good time?)

I’m still plugging away. It’s thirty years later and I’ve retired from my 9-5, so hopefully I can make some real progress.

My kids. It’s been more than 26 years.

Mostly just bugfixes and maintenance now.

Myself, and god is it a mess of a project

My YouTube channel. Been at it for 10 years, haven’t even broken through the 100,000 subscribers ceiling yet. But it’s fun, so I keep doing it.

I maintain a handful of RimWorld mods, going on about 6 years now. They’re in a pretty stable and mature place so they don’t take too up much effort, but I do check for Steam commens a few times a day, to make sure nobody found any bugs or major issues.

If we’re talking something I actually have worked on in the past year, a crummy book I’ve been writing on Wattpad. Have 5-6 “Legacy” chapters out, but they’re gonna eventually be rewritten if I ever get to them within my lifetime. They’re only there to exist, pretty much. Not an interesting book by any stretch of the imagination.

Just a group of kids in the mid 90s spending their summer doing normal things like how in one unpublished chapter you follow the main character as he goes to what he considers a boring wedding and has to deal with the embarrassment of at one point having to dance with his cousin, who thinks he’s kinda cute.

Been working on it since maybe fall 2017 or sometime in 2018. Otherwise, I cannot think of any projects of mine that have been going on any longer than that that I actually have actively worked on this year and am willing to share (there’s some fanfiction series, but I ain’t willing to go into that, despite it not being too cringe).

It was my reddit account, where I had twelve years’ worth to commentary, predictions, poetry, etc in the comments.

But they permabanned me and deleted everything I ever wrote.

My homelab is probably the longest running, but it runs things that I depend on, so I can’t say it’s much of a side project.

Probably Tesseract since I absolutely figured my interest would have fizzled out long ago.

Classic luxury car restore for about a decade.

When my parents first moved in to my childhood home in the mid-'80s, the 6-acre property was wide-open fields next to plowed farm land, with a handful of freshly planted trees scattered around the property. I loved to run and play across all the open land as a child.

When I was really young, my dad decided to let sections of our 6-acre plot of land go back to nature, because he didn’t have the time nor energy to care for it all.

When I was old enough to use our riding mower by myself, (around 10 years old) I made it a personal goal to reclaim some of the land. Which got me in trouble every time my dad caught me mowing down the tall grass. But apparently, my mother was also upset about the lost lawn. When my dad wasn’t home, she would go out and trim back the overgrowth so we had some semblance of lawn around the house.

When I turned 18, I joined the military and left home. About a decade into my service, my parents divorced and my mom moved out. When I retired from the service after 20 years served, my wife and I moved back in with my dad.

It turns out that my dad spent the past decade ignoring large chunks of the lawn. I came home to a literal forest on the property, where trimmed lawn and open grassy fields used to be. My dad was old and suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, so he wasn’t able to mow much anymore and pretty much gave up on the lawn. I did my best to keep it trim around the house, then I started cutting back overgrowth and the new trees forming in the yard.

It’s been almost 3 years since I moved back in. My dad passed away almost a year ago and I inherited my childhood home from him. I’m still spending my summers cutting back overgrowth and trimming/removing trees. This will probably take me another decade by myself to reclaim the land, but I intend to turn it back into a beautifully manicured property instead of the tangled, overgrown nightmare my dad left it to become.

I started 30 years ago on this side project and I’m still going today.

I don’t have side projects because it’s hard enough to simply get up for work 5 days a week.

I just made a major step on one. I’ve been collecting small electronics of all sorts over the last 15 years or so, a lot of them pretty obscure. I just got a computer I wanted to use to build an inventory of everything and start a YouTube channel to highlight each item in the collection.

I’ve been working on a raspberry pi based music notes box for shows on and off for about 5 years. I can count through and change songs with my foot, so I have an easier time keeping track of where I am in the song for live shows (I’m the bassist). I did all the programming and hardware stuff.

I’ve been trying to make a lego golf playing automaton for about three years, and I keep running into issues with the system that brings balls up from inside of the model to the surface, and keep having to completely redesign the mechanism. I’m now starting on my fourth redesign.

I’ve been composing an orchestra piece for slightly over two years now. I’m kind of learning how to do that as I go along, having only really written songs for up to three instruments beforehand.