Wayne Gramlich's Project Status

I work on lots of projects simultaneously. At any point in time, each of my projects is in one of the following states:

Work In Progress: This is the most common state for one of my projects. It means that project has been started, but not finished. Furthermore, it means that I still have intentions of continuing to work on it in the future. It does not mean that I am actively working on the project now. It may be years before I get back to working on the project.
Abandoned: An abandoned project is one that I have decided not to ever work on in the future. One common way that a project gets abondoned is that somebody decides to manufacture the project as a product for sale in the marketplace and I simply purchase the product. Another way that a project gets abandoned is because viable alternatives become available. The third way a project becomes abandoned is that I lose interest and decide that I have no intention of working on the project any further.
Pending: A pending project is one that I have not even started yet. It is not uncommon for a pending project to go straight to abandoned without ever being started.
Finished: This almost never happens. When it does, it basically means that I think the project is complete and needs no further work on my part.

The next question is `Why do I expose all of these incomplete projects to the Web?' The answer to this question has to do with search engines and electronic communities. With the advent of freely available search engines, it becomes possible for people who have common interests to find one another. If you are lucky, there is a good chance that the area you are interested in has a network news group. For interest areas not covered by a network news group, you can go to a search engine and hopefully find some people who have published material on the subject and start interacting with the publisher via E-mail.

This is all nice in theory, but does it happen in practice? The answer is `yes!' many times over. For example, some people have stumbled across some of my very incomplete work on rocketry and we have started to collaborate as a result. Similarly, my incomplete work on stepper motors has generated a number of E-mails. Also, somebody ran across my train pages and we've been collaborating in that area as well.

Anyhow, the bottom line for me is that I have no problems with letting you look at my projects as they slowly progress and some people have derived a benefit from seeing them. As long as people can easily figure out which ones are "work in progress", there should be no real harm done.