Every abandoned repository was once a 2 AM obsession. You know the rhythm. The idea strikes around midnight. You scaffol

Every abandoned repository was once a 2 AM obsession. You know the rhythm. The idea strikes around midnight. You scaffold the repo before your coffee goes cold. For eleven days you push code with the manic energy of someone who has finally cracked it. Then the sprint ends. Or the boiler breaks. Or you simply open the code on a Tuesday evening and the thread is gone.

Most developers carry this weight. It is not quite regret, more like a quiet roster of what-ifs. Your GitHub profile becomes an archive of good intentions. The creator of Side Project Cemetery built something that faces this directly. Their tool turns your public profile into a moonlit graveyard where every stale repo gets a headstone, a date of death, and occasionally a punchline.

The Graveyard Grows

Side projects die for mundane reasons. You needed to learn a new framework, so you built a CLI tool. You wanted to automate a spreadsheet, so you wrote a Python wrapper. The prototype worked well enough to solve your problem, and that was the end. There was no user waiting, no deadline screaming, no manager asking for a status update. Without external pressure, motivation has to carry the full load. When motivation dips, the project freezes.

Visit a typical developer’s GitHub and you will see the pattern. A rust-colored contribution graph for one repo. A README that ends with “TODO: write tests.” A commit history that falls off a cliff six months ago. We treat these repos like embarrassing souvenirs. We scroll past them quickly, as if unfinished code were something to hide. Side Project Cemetery takes the opposite stance. It says: bury them properly. Acknowledge them. Then, if you want, bring one back.

How the Cemetery Works

The interface is blunt and simple. You type in any GitHub username. The app queries the GitHub REST API, pulls every public repository, and filters for those without a push in the last one hundred and eighty days. Each result becomes a grave. You see the birth year, the death year, and an epitaph generated from the repo’s details.

Some epitaphs land gently:

• Written in JavaScript. Died of callback exhaustion.

Others offer a more generous reading of history:

• Not dead. Just aggressively on hold since 2025.

If you want more personality, you can enable the optional Gemini integration. The AI reads the repo’s language and context to draft custom epitaphs that feel specific rather than templated. There is also an optional ElevenLabs integration that reads the eulogy aloud, which sounds like a gimmick until you hear your own abandoned API wrapper described in a somber narrator voice. At that point, the absurdity breaks through the guilt, and guilt was the whole thing keeping the repo buried.

Rekindle: A Button Against Overwhelm

The graveyard is only half the point. The real feature hides beneath each headstone: a Rekindle button. Click it, and the app reads your README. It parses whatever you wrote about the project’s purpose, stacks it against the existing code, and writes a short pitch to remind you why you cared in the first place. Then it ends with one small, concrete action you could take tonight. Not a roadmap. Not a refactor plan. One task. Five minutes of work.

This matters because the hardest part of returning to an old project is not coding. It is remembering where you were and forgiving yourself for stopping. A long-dead project feels enormous. You assume you will need three hours just to understand the architecture again. The Rekindle button compresses that assumption into a single todo. The goal is to make your next commit feel five minutes away, because once you have a single diff in the history, momentum tends to return.

Why Keep the Stack This Simple

Technically, the project practices what it preaches. It is built with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It uses the GitHub REST API. There are no servers, no build steps, no framework-of-the-month to maintain. You could host it on GitHub Pages and walk away.

That minimalism is a feature, not laziness. A tool about resurrecting old code should not itself rely on a fragile dependency tree. If the creator abandons Side Project Cemetery for six months, the cemetery does not become another resident in its own graveyard. The code stays legible. No webpack configs to update, no Docker images to patch. It is a quiet argument for restraint in tooling: sometimes a static site and an API key are enough.

When the Button Actually Works

개발자는 개발 과정에서 자신의 죽은 프로젝트들이 자신을 불렀다고 말합니다. 특히 하나는 하룻밤 동안의 집착이었으며, 흥분에 휩싸여 정신없이 작성한 뒤 잊혀졌습니다. 그는 그 프로젝트에 Rekindle 버튼을 사용했습니다. 앱은 README를 읽고, 전제를 기억해낸 뒤, 완료해야 할 실제 작업을 다시 건네주었습니다. 효과가 있었습니다. 그는 그 주에 누락된 부분을 완성하여 출시했습니다.

이것이 이 도구의 핵심 논거입니다. 열정은 죽지 않습니다. 잠시 잠들 뿐입니다. 대부분의 방치된 저장소는 엔지니어링의 실패가 아닙니다. 맥락(context)의 실패입니다. 맥락을 놓친 이유는 그 흐름이 오직 당신의 머릿속에만 존재했고, 당신의 머릿속이 다른 흐름으로 옮겨갔기 때문입니다. Side Project Cemetery는 그 맥락을 외부화합니다. 이 도구는 README를 읽어주므로, 당신이 과거의 자신을 처음부터 다시 재구성할 필요가 없게 해줍니다.

진짜 척도는 얼마나 많은 저장소를 부활시키느냐가 아닙니다. 얼마나 많은 저장소에 대해 더 이상 찜찜함을 느끼지 않게 되느냐입니다. 이 공동묘지는 당신이 준비될 때까지 그 프로젝트들이 쉴 수 있는 공간을 제공합니다. 그리고 당신이 준비되었을 때, 도구는 당신에게 삽 한 자루와 단 하나의 지침을 건넵니다: "여기서부터 시작하세요."

당신의 아이디어가 묻혀 있게 두지 마세요.

https://pyaroslav.github.io/side-project-cemetery/에서 공동묘지를 방문하고, Dev.to의 여기에서 전체 빌드 스토리를 읽어보세요.