Shutting Down Projects
Shutting down a project makes you think about its lifetime. I suppose this is a Post Mortem of sorts, and also a description of the projects journey. The TL;DR is
You should take time to think about if a project is giving you joy,if not either shut it down or sell it.
My wife and I have ran a homepage between 2017 and 2022, which we choose to shut down since the situation that sprung the project had been resolved and that we no longer had the energy to support it.
The homepage started out as a way to shine light on the horrible handling of highly qualified work immigrants in Sweden. The state screamed that they wanted more academics and highly skilled professionals to move to Sweden, but they made sure to make it a living hell if just the slightest detail was off with the conditions of employment.
The homepage was initially a Node.js application backed by a PostgreSQL database running on linode, which had an admin interface and a simple editor to create blog posts.
A year or two later I learned that you could host your homepage on GitLab for free as a static site. It was then turned into a static site built with Hugo, which made a lot of sense since there were no dynamic content for the users and both my wife and I are decently proficient with git.
This simplified the project, and reduced the cost at the same time. It was a big win, which brought some more love to the project.
In addition to lowering the cost and making the project fun to work with again, it also reduced the stress of working with the project. No more database backups and keeping the software up to date to make sure there are no security vulnerabilities.
Time continued to pass and our interest in the project continued to decline to the point where we concluded that it was time to shut it down. It had its run, but at the end we rather shut it down then let it make us feel guilty that we are not investing time and effort into it.
If you want to, you can read check it out at checkinsweden at web-archive.
