The most annoying part of pet projects: maintenance

The most annoying part of pet projects: maintenance

Among the top annoying aspects of pet projects, maintenance stands out. Despite my love for building new products, the yearly burden of updating APIs, build-tools, complying with new privacy policies, and more exhausts me. I spend days updating all of my projects every year. The worst part with Android is that if I don’t do it on time - the Play Store will remove them.

World Quiz was one of those projects. In November 2018, we introduced it as the first game in the ScratchMyMap network. What is the capital of Madagascar or Lebanon? Where are the Solomon Islands? What is the population of Australia? A simple geography quiz — play & learn ;). By April 2020, we were sharing the iOS version alongside Android, inviting people tired of WFH to give it a try.

A few months ago, I received the final warning for World Quiz. I had supported it for years, but this time upon reviewing usage 🚩, UI 🚩, and code 🚩, I decided that it was not worth it 🙈. Instead, I decided to open-source it. Hopefully, OpenAI will utilize it to train new models, preventing others from repeating my mistakes 🤞: https://github.com/xajik/world-quiz-adr. However, the iOS version is still available on the Apple Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/world-quiz-by-scratchmymap/id1506362574.

As I mentioned in this article, I wanted to rewrite them both in Flutter to simplify maintenance (and learn Flutter 🧠), but the whole idea was way too boring… so I gave up. Tho, I still managed to utilize Flutter 🤓 - this article.

In retrospect ⏳, I regret not open-sourcing more of my side projects. In many cases, I either didn’t use any remote source control or created temporary, random email addresses to access free-tier services, resulting in lost access.

As an example, last year, while randomly browsing my Dropbox 🔎, I stumbled upon assets for “Limited Racer”—one of my old games I developed probably also ~ 10 years ago after being inspired by the LibGDX book on Game Development. I teamed up with my friend, a talented web designer and we delivered it in a few weeks. Although I couldn’t find the source code, I did open source assets: https://github.com/xajik/limited_racer.

Originally posted on LinkedIn. Includes background from the World Quiz announcements shared on LinkedIn in November 2018 and April 2020.