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

De maker geeft toe dat hun eigen dode projecten hen tijdens de ontwikkeling confronteerden. Eén project in het bijzonder was een obsessie van één nacht, geschreven in een waas van enthousiasme en daarna vergeten. Ze gebruikten de Rekindle-knop op dat project. De app las de README, herinnerde zich de premisse en gaf een concrete taak terug om af te maken. Het werkte. Ze brachten het ontbrekende onderdeel diezelfde week nog uit.

Dit is de kern van het argument van de tool. Passie sterft niet. Het doet een dutje. De meeste verlaten repositories zijn geen technische mislukkingen. Het zijn mislukkingen van context. Je verloor de draad omdat de draad alleen in je hoofd leefde, en je hoofd zich weer op andere zaken richtte. Side Project Cemetery externaliseert die context. Het leest de README, zodat je je eerdere zelf niet vanaf nul hoeft te reconstrueren.

De echte maatstaf is niet hoeveel repositories je tot leven wekt. Het is hoeveel je er niet meer een ongemakkelijk gevoel bij hebt. De begraafplaats geeft ze een plek om te rusten totdat je er klaar voor bent. En wanneer je er klaar voor bent, geeft het je een schep en één enkele instructie: begin hier.

Laat je ideeën niet langer begraven blijven.

Bezoek de begraafplaats op https://pyaroslav.github.io/side-project-cemetery/, en lees het volledige bouwverhaal op Dev.to hier.