I have often fallen into the trap of doing things because they are trendy or hot currently. This is majorly true for my software side projects because I love building. I tend to browse X or LinkedIn and find people building/working on interesting topics like distributed systems, databases, runtimes and I want to jump in right away.
In the past I have built toy SQL query engines, contributed to a property-based testing framework, explored durable execution engines, and much more. Each of these explorations started when I came across these topics and found them very interesting, so much so that I wanted to build these things myself. If you are like me, you might have come across such situations and probably would have also experienced some kind of overwhelm.
Jumping between topics while chasing the high of building an end-to-end thing and see it work is amazing, but it has often tired me off. Most importantly, it has often distracted me from pursuing some long-term projects I have always enjoyed doing. E.g. my compiler project Gom and the accompanying series Writing a Compiler in TypeScript. This work has given me so much joy, especially from the feedback I've received from random folks on the Internet. The project is in progress since 2023, but I have rarely worked on it throughout this period and have only had spurts of motivation to extend it - one more chapter, one more feature.
What I have realised is that on X and LinkedIn, the feed pushes content that you find novel and exciting and that sometimes (at least for me) leads to an assumption that what you are seeing is what is happening in the industry/community. Whereas what it actually means is that your are seeing what you'd engage with the most. And if you flip the hypothesis - if you engage with what you want to work with or find interesting, the feed will show you content around those topics.
One of the reasons my compiler project/series has been taking so long is me thinking "this topic is trivial", "why would anyone want to read this", followed by me moving to other more interesting topics. But this is so false! The moment I start talking about my work on LinkedIn again, I start seeing content from other folks who are doing something similar. I recently came across a post explaining compiler internals by writing one in C#, and I love it! This has only encouraged me to keep writing, define a "finished" state and keep writing.
To anyone who is going through anything similar, if you are feeling the overwhelm of things happening around, keep doing your thing - let it soak. Take your time, push through to the end of the thing. I am not against exploration, I'd encourage it. Yet sticking to a few core problems will help you accomplish substantially rather than scrape surface-level achievements. If you have gotten yourself in a topic you love and find valuable, let it soak for a while.
