2021-04-10
Secure your side project in a vault
Svalbard is a remote island group north of Norway. Its largest island, Spitsbergen, is the home of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, where anyone can deposit seeds to preserve them even in a case of a global crisis or a regional disaster. Being such a remote place deep underground, you can be almost certain that you can still recover the regional plant varieties no matter what happens outside the vault.
Attainability — or lack thereof — of the seed vault’s longevity was one of the thoughts I had when browsing through the list of my even somewhat recent side projects. While some of the projects suffered merely from a no longer existent email address or a few dead links, for some projects the database had been irrevocably corrupted or the whole concept had lost its timeliness. When all you’re faced with is expired SSL certificate warnings and infinitely energetic loading spinners, it is hard to get excited about the past endeavors anymore.
That feeling of dread has adjusted my thinking and approach to every new side project I am starting. No longer is the goal to make something technically impressive, but rather to start as small as possible with the least possible moving parts.
Adjust against apathy
The biggest enemy, of course, is yourself. Expiring domain notification emails for side projects I once dedicated all my free time to now register as very low priorities, and more of them than not get stuck in endless “Snooze until Next Weekend” loops. By the time you even start getting those emails though, the whole house of cards has probably crumbled in the background. The domain itself is last of the worries!
The solution is simple: drop the domain, drop the SSL certificate, and DROP the database.
Of course, domain surfing is half (or for some, most) of the fun of starting a project of your own. Dropping vowels from the end to achieve euphony,
Google translating what pets.com would look like in Portuguese (animaisdeestimação.pt) to capture a new market, and generating random five-letter
words are all tried and true methods. However, one question must be raised: will you actually care about enough of those domains?
I know I don’t care at all about lookingforarentalapt.com. That alone is not a good enough reason for me to not pursue a functionally very much over-engineered
rental apartment search engine, but it might indicate that now’s too early to go for a domain. The effective solution is to just attach it as a subdomain for an
existing domain you care about. Having apartments.myidentity.com not only looks much better, but also attaches the project more closely to your own brand. It’s
a psychological thing that makes you care more.
Trust the big G more than you trust yourself
A few years ago I started a collaborative project. Starting on top of an existing game framework, we started exploring with quite a few experimental ideas. Some ideas bla bla. And importantly, surely we didn’t want to rely on something like Github to host all the code but rather setup a self-hosted Git instance on a Raspberry Pi.
Soon after developing the idea was paused as is usual, and eventually our local clones of the Git repo were removed. The code was backed up to the Pi Git, right? Turns out Pi corrupting SD cards is quite a common occurrence, including here.