Archive Your Projects!

My first experience with this was making my DOS Gamedev page in 2008 to "memorialize" the fun stuff I had made and learned four years prior in 2004. (At the time, it felt like I was describing something from the distant past. Ha!)

I still have the source and DOS executables somewhere, but I really don’t need them. Those screenshots and descriptions are the part I want to keep from this experience.

Ideally, you capture this stuff while it’s all still pretty fresh in your mind. You are not going to remember all of the details later and your future self is going to have a blast reading about it. (By the way, for that reason, I recommend keeping it pretty light-hearted so it’s actually fun to read later.)

One of the great things about working and learning in-public is that those details are already packaged up for you. Now the problem may be having too much detail to sift through.

When I finally finished my Meow5 project, I was so happy to be done with it so I was free to work on other things. It was really hard to make myself write up this conclusion:

Meow5: The Conclusion

I had already written so much about it that a summary felt redundant and needless.

But once I was done, it felt so good to have something that summarized the whole project in one place. That is the page I would send people to if I wanted to share this project!

Yes, it repeats things I’ve already written in at least three other places. But in the repetition, I got better at describing it. And at the moment of finishing the project, I had the best vantage point I’ve ever had to "see" the whole thing (except maybe someone who reads through the entire dev log in one go…​which is something I’ve never done). Capturing that viewpoint was invaluable.

And the best part is that it let me celebrate the project and share the fun parts with others while I still remembered what the fun parts were!