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.

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 kids. It’s been more than 26 years.

Mostly just bugfixes and maintenance now.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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 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.

When I was in high school (like 2001 or so) I started doing electronics stuff, hobby projects, console mods, etc. simple stuff at first like installing mod chips and building rgb mods for older rf consoles but then building pic and embedded stuff which was somewhat impressive in the pre arduino days (even though it was functionally the same thing, just slightly more difficult because there wasn’t a dev board or ide)

That led to learning enough to fix stuff, which I did through college to earn some cash. I kept doing it, and kept doing it.

At one point I was actually earning quite a bit of money. The early smartphone days were great. Lasted a decent clip too. Each iphone generation I would buy a 50 pack of screens and batteries from chinese wholesalers that sold very good quality ones. Would easily burn through those. I didn’t really like doing this but it was lucrative. I simply charged less then anyone else in town and still made a decent amount per hour because it was ultimately stupid easy to do and all the repair shops (including apple) grossly overcharged. I would do it for $50 and the parts were like $17. Took me like 12 minutes. I was just doing it after work and making an extra 15k a year at the peak just off phones

Then the oled phones came out and all of a sudden parts were like $200, so that sucked, so that dropped drastically

Then the iphone xs came out and if you changed the parts the phone would give a nag screen saying “these parts may not be authentic” and disable features, even if I pulled the parts from another iphone. This also caused another drop although eventually I found programmers from china that could defeat it (for $$$ but at that point it was about the principle)

Then Samsung started doing it too (though they later walked it back, but then unwalked it back maybe? I don’t pay it much mind these days. For that matter apple also finally allows you to program new parts as of ios 18 but they have to be genuine apple parts that aren’t locked and buying them from apple is $$$$$. Plus last I checked they won’t even sell you parts unless you give them the device imei/serial so you can’t buy in bulk, get discounts, and doing what I did is completely impractical)

Then I gave up on that. I still do some of what I always did: buy broken stuff, fix it, sell it online. This is more fun to do because it’s interesting, like solving a puzzle, but less lucrative because it’s far more time consuming. I also no longer have to directly deal with customers which is nice (aside from the occasional person on ebay who wants a refund without returning the item because I didn’t make it clear the item was refurbished even though it was listed as refurbished, the description says it’s refurbished with a description of how it was refurbished, and an image saying “refurbished item” as the primary picture on the auction).

I also sometimes do hdmi and usb c replacements on consoles and phones because they don’t serialize those (yet, probably)

And every once in a while I still pursue an actual hobby project. My current one is making a proper portable Dreamcast but instead of doing it based on a raspberry pi or whatever I’m using the leaked schematics to rebuild the board with only the necessities in a much smaller footprint and trying to integrate some modern niceties (replace the disk drive with either sd card or cf, modern efficient power supply, built in VMU, etc). But it would sacrifice an actual Dreamcast and reuse the cpu, gpu, ram, Yamaha sound chip, etc so it wouldn’t emulate anything and be 100% accurate. About 80% to a prototype but progress is slow (been doing it for years) because I do have an actual job that takes up much of my time. Also I lost some enthusiasm because someone in china beat me to it years ago; you can buy it on AliExpress for like $500 if you really want one (but theirs is ugly and doesn’t have a lot of the feature set I plan. It does exist though, so it beats mine quite handily)

I’ve been working on my 3D printed Mini Macro Pad for a couple years now, slowly making improvements over time.

Fiction writing. I started when I was very young, it’s by far my most long-runbing hobby.