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Limiting the scope can't be emphasized enough if you're married with kids.

I've failed to ship 6-7 side projects because of limits to my free time. The best side project I've successfully shipped, besides blogging, was limited to 2 "features" one of which I already had from a failed project.

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So basically, try to group anything into smallest possible self-contained utilities, until you grow a pile of them big enough that your next project can be basically assembled from them...

exactly! MVP FTW!

Ironically, my current side project evolved exactly the opposite way: I tacked on more and more features, and later broke everything apart into plugins once the correct abstraction had emerged.

Devils advocate here, it sounds more like your problem was constantly moving to another side project before completing the last. If you had spent all that time on a single project, how far would it have gone?

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