Just finish something
In 2025, I honestly lost count of the separate side projects / utilities / websites that I eventually intended on planning to release. And these weren’t just one off, slop ideas that I threw some code together for and never touched again. I’m talking fully scaled up, 80-90% completed projects that just never saw the light of day. This included some incredible things like:
Fully automated ShopGoodwill.com bot, featuring auto-bidding on items, intelligent bid raising based on the item timer, and anti-bot detection measures.
Instagram following/follower list scraper that was scalable, avoided Instagram anti-bot measures, and was able to export hundreds of thousands of lists of followers.
SoundCloud playlist parser with high-quality downloads with full metadata on the files, without requiring an account.
Embeddable feedback utility for SaaS developers, including a full Vite +
React module, dashboard, authentication system, and payment processing.
Unofficial API client for HLTV, Counter-Strike’s #1 news coverage site, made by reverse engineering their mobile app and bypassing their anti-bot measures.
Self-hosted ebook downloader that scraped multiple sources for .epub and .pdf files and using an SMTP server to send them to a Kindle email for automatically adding books to a Kindle’s library
Multiple Obsidian plugins that employed LLMs to automate creation of flashcards, organizational features, etc.
iMessage statistics CLI that used Bun.sql to access the chat.db file.
Florida license plate availability checker that was able to process up to 42 license plates per second.
The list can go on, and on, and on - these were just some of the notable ones that had substance, and with a little more work, could have been released in the state they now sit dormant in.
Why do I do this? I wish I knew. I like building things that other people will use, which is how I ended up maintaining Stardew Valley’s biggest community tool. People that enjoy the work I create motivates me to continue creating - but I often kneecap myself from releasing things before even being able to determine if people would enjoy the work at all.
I’m posting this because I’d love to work my way through this list over the next year and finally release them, along with continuing to create things that I find interesting to me. Not creating because I think it would have value to others, but instead shift the mindset - creating, releasing, and continuing because I found it interesting.