Still Working On It Turns 17 Years of Side Projects Into Searchable Maker Timelines

A side project usually gets a launch post. Still Working On It gives it something more awkward: a timeline that remembers what its maker said years before the launch post. The browser archive follows public answers to recurring project-sharing threads, making the cheerful “working on” phase searchable across 17 years. The phrase comes with an impressively long warranty.

The site’s own interface starts with squares representing answers and columns representing threads. That turns a pile of comments into something you can explore by time. A separate search asks whether anyone has built a particular kind of thing, and an account lookup collects one person’s answers newest first. The archive itself supplies the account of how it was assembled.

The useful surprise is continuity. One person can change projects while keeping the same account, or return to the same idea long after everyone else has forgotten it. A timeline makes those returns visible without requiring a successful company at the end. That matters because the launch is usually the cleanest part of a maker’s public record. The years of detours tend to require more digging (and less flattering lighting).

The archive is candid about what its attractive charts cannot settle. Its notes say, “Individual labels can be wrong.” A language model reads answers to assign topics and project details. That is useful for finding a candidate to investigate, but it leaves a human-sized job at the last step: reading the original words before drawing a conclusion about somebody’s work.

The matching rules are narrow in ways a casual browser could miss. A launch thread is associated with a project only when the same account posted it and the title or link names the project. A launch under another identity or another name can slip past. Those rules make an apparent absence particularly dangerous: a blank space in an archive can mean the matching process missed something, without saying anything about what the maker actually finished.

The source notes also limit the GitHub star counts. They come from repositories linked in answers, and the linked repository might belong to someone else. That is a good reason to resist treating the page as a ranking of individual developers. Sharing a useful dependency does not make its stars your own, however generous the internet feels that afternoon.

The site also offers a way to request removal of your answers. Public comments can be easier to overlook when scattered across old threads than when collected under one username. Bringing them together changes their visibility even when the underlying words were already public. Someone else’s unfinished idea deserves more care than a scoreboard invites.

An archive like this could become a good place to find collaborators with a lasting interest in a subject, provided readers treat repeated work as context rather than a productivity score. The unresolved part is what happened away from the threads: private repositories, renamed projects and work that never needed a public announcement.

Some projects outlive the announcement.