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The last personal software project I completed, I worked on it quickly, writing and releasing it in a couple of weeks. I've made some small updates since, adding cmake support, but I have no plans to ever expand the main functionality. And that's nice! To set aside a few weeks, or months, whatever, and work towards completion. To then put it out of mind, and work on other things.
On the other end, it's a lot of fun to have an open-ended project that ends when you do. I have a game that I've been working on, and started it more than a decade ago; I work on it at least weekly, often daily. I add features people suggest. I work on things I find interesting. It sort of inhabits its own space and the shape of it comes a bit at a time.
A decade plus in and I realize it's got no reasonable end, that at this point it's only done when I'm dead or if I abandon it. This is freeing: to know that I have the time and pace to make it whatever I want. And if I don't? Well, let's assume I die earlier than expected. At that point, I won't be worrying about releases anymore.
Too much is made, especially in games, about the process of _next_: next project, next step, that at every milestone you necessarily leave something behind. This is supposed to be good wisdom. _I had to write 99 projects to make the 100th_. But what if I don't want to make a hundred projects? What if the one thing I really want to do is what I'm working on right now?
It's slow going. Some days it's a slog, and other days the silence can be overwhelming. I see what my contemporaries are working on, and I feel pangs of jealously, of hopelessness at my own work. I have to stop and tell myself I'm not at this full time, that I'm an experienced dev but I've only got so many hours divided so many ways. But if anything, I've got the advantage of years. Who else is going to be working on the same thing in 2043? Probably not many. But I've been at this more than ten years now, and I wouldn't be shocked if I was working on it in another twenty or more.
How many others are long-term maintainers? Who else can keep going, and tend a tiny flame? It'll be interesting to see, in two decades and as I'm in my sixties, what things look like, what kind of a place we're in. Whether I'll have ever found anything like the success of some other devs and teams, or whether I'm still hacking at the code in near-obscurity, putting features into a bimonthly release, putting others into my backlog, despairing that I can't stop the work that I love but which doesn't help me, and wondering how I ever got so old.