I too have a 'hobby project' that I have worked on for several years. I must say that my motivations have varied quite a bit over that time. I mainly do it because it is a passion of mine and I love to write great code that does amazing things. But I would also love for the project to actually make some money. I don't really need the money, but money is a great indicator of how other people value your work. Money would also let me buy the extra help that the project needs.
It is a data management system called Didgets https://didgets.com/ and is currently in open beta. The ideas came from decades of experience working with other data management systems that I thought needed drastic improvement. I dug deep into file systems while writing network file system drivers and disk utilities (PartitionMagic and Drive Image). I spent years working with Postgres databases.
I love writing code that does big things faster and uses less resources than traditional systems. I wanted to be able to find a group of files among 100s of millions of files in seconds instead of using long directory traversal methods or the arduous task of creating separate indexes that could become out of sync with the file system. I wanted to query huge DB tables in record time without needing separate indexing structures that can slow down transactions.
So I will stay up until 2am tweaking an algorithm or parallelizing some code so that it runs through a large data set in 2 seconds instead of 20. This keeps me going, but I also wouldn't mind at all if a bunch of other people also found this valuable and decided to pay me something for my hard work.
The code is cross-platform (C++ code with almost zero dependencies) including the windowing framework (Qt) that the browser application uses. I have built Linux versions in the past to test it and I would also like to build a MacOS version, but bandwidth makes it hard to support multiple versions for every build.
If it starts to get some traction, I can work on that.
It is a data management system called Didgets https://didgets.com/ and is currently in open beta. The ideas came from decades of experience working with other data management systems that I thought needed drastic improvement. I dug deep into file systems while writing network file system drivers and disk utilities (PartitionMagic and Drive Image). I spent years working with Postgres databases.
I love writing code that does big things faster and uses less resources than traditional systems. I wanted to be able to find a group of files among 100s of millions of files in seconds instead of using long directory traversal methods or the arduous task of creating separate indexes that could become out of sync with the file system. I wanted to query huge DB tables in record time without needing separate indexing structures that can slow down transactions.
So I will stay up until 2am tweaking an algorithm or parallelizing some code so that it runs through a large data set in 2 seconds instead of 20. This keeps me going, but I also wouldn't mind at all if a bunch of other people also found this valuable and decided to pay me something for my hard work.