The GitHub Graveyard: Why Most Side Projects Fail Let’s be honest—your GitHub is probably littered with half-finished projects that seemed like brilliant ideas at 11 PM on a Tuesday. A repo with a README that says “TODO: add documentation,” three commits from last year, and approximately zero stars. We’ve all been there. The project started with enthusiasm, but somewhere between week two and month three, it quietly died on the vine....
Let’s talk about the elephant in the conference room—the one that’s been sitting there since 2005 and absolutely refuses to learn Slack. I’m not talking about older workers themselves. I’m talking about the organizational pathology that treats seniority as a substitute for judgment, experience as an excuse for inflexibility, and tenure as immunity from accountability. It’s a disease that quietly kills innovation, poisons team dynamics, and—here’s the kicker—actually harms the very people it claims to protect....
I remember the day our production system went down at 2 AM. Our CEO asked, “What happened?” and I had three options: look at dashboards that showed nothing useful, dig through terabytes of logs with grep, or pray. Spoiler alert: I prayed. And that’s when I realized we’d been doing observability all wrong. Fast forward to today, and observability has become the holy grail of modern engineering. But here’s the dirty secret vendors won’t tell you: you don’t need a six-figure annual contract with a SaaS platform to have decent observability....
There’s a romantic notion that lives rent-free in every indie hacker’s head. You’re sitting at 3 AM, coffee getting cold, your side project just crossed 1,000 users. The dopamine hits differently when you know it’s yours—every line of code, every server decision, every scaling challenge. This is the dream, right? Total independence. Complete control. Freedom from the tyranny of cloud provider pricing that punishes you the moment your product gains traction....
You know that moment when someone asks “do we really need real-time analytics?” in a meeting, and everyone stares at their laptops awkwardly? Yeah. Let’s fix that conversation with some actual data. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: real-time analytics systems are expensive. They demand infrastructure, operational complexity, and specialized talent that doesn’t grow on trees. But they’re also the difference between catching fraud in milliseconds versus discovering it three days later when your accounting team notices something weird....