Every developer has them — side projects started with genuine excitement on a Friday night, quietly abandoned by the following Tuesday. They deserve better than just disappearing into the graveyard of forgotten GitHub repositories.
That's the philosophy behind DevGraveyard, a memorial platform built by Varshith V Hegde and posted to the DEV Community on July 12, 2026. It's a creative solution to a real problem: developers actually do grieve these abandoned projects. This tool turns that grief into something meaningful and, honestly, pretty funny.
What's the Actual Problem?
When you abandon a side project, there's often genuine emotion involved. You were excited about it. You poured time into it. Maybe life got busy, or the idea turned out to be harder than expected, or you just lost interest. The project simply vanishes into digital limbo.
DevGraveyard treats it differently. Instead of letting your project fade away silently, the platform gives it a proper goodbye — complete with tombstone, eulogy, and community mourning. It's silly on the surface, but it captures something real: the bittersweet feeling of letting go of something you built.
How It Actually Works
The process is simple and deliberately theatrical. When you visit the live demo at devgraveyard.varshithvhegde.in, you start by connecting your GitHub account. The platform then walks you through a three-step burial wizard.
First, you choose which abandoned repository to bury. The tool fetches your actual GitHub repos and shows you which ones haven't already been buried — to prevent burying the same project twice.
Second, you pick a "cause of death" from a curated list. The options are darkly funny: "Never Made it Past Localhost," "Ran Out of Weekend," "It Was Complicated." You can also write your own cause if none of those fit. You're invited to add an epitaph, up to 100 characters, as a final message.
Third, before the burial is final, you see a live preview of your tombstone rendered with real data from your project. This is where the technical heart starts to show.
The Emotional Data Layer
Here's where DevGraveyard gets clever. The platform doesn't just create a generic memorial — it analyzes your actual commit history.
When you bury a project, the tool downloads your full commit history from GitHub and computes what the creator calls "obsession data." This means finding things like: your peak obsession streak (longest consecutive days of commits), the maximum number of commits in a single day, and your latest night session (commits made between midnight and 5 AM). It even saves your last commit message as your "final words."
These numbers appear on your tombstone. So if your project had 30 commits on its best day, that fact becomes part of its memorial. A project with 3 total commits tells a very different story than one with hundreds.
The AI Eulogy — Where It Gets Personal
Once your tombstone is created, Google Gemini (specifically the gemini-2.5-flash model) writes a dramatic breakup letter from you to your project. This isn't a generic template. The prompt is carefully engineered.
The AI writes exactly three paragraphs, formatted as a letter that opens with "Dear [project name]" and closes with "Yours, but not anymore, — A Tired Developer." The prompt explicitly tells Gemini to reference at least two of your real data points: your peak obsession, your late-night coding sessions, your cause of death, and your final commit message. The tone should be dramatic, darkly funny, and genuinely melancholic — all within 250 words.
The creator shared an example from their own abandoned ARweave project (56 commits, 30 on the best day, buried as "Never Made it Past Localhost"). Gemini wrote: "I remember the fervor, the peak obsession when I clocked 30 commits in a single day, mapping out every PLpgSQL schema and every front-end interaction. We built features that felt so robust within the confines of our little local development environment."
Notice how the AI references the actual numbers and acknowledges the genuine work involved. When you first view the eulogy, it appears with a typewriter animation, then gets saved permanently in the database.
The 3D Graveyard Experience
The visual centerpiece is an interactive 3D cemetery built with Three.js and React Three Fiber. It's a full scene with bare winter trees, fireflies, flickering candles, glowing soul wisps rising from the ground, and moonlight. The tombstones themselves are rendered using a single geometric shape (ExtrudeGeometry) rather than multiple pieces — cleaner and more elegant.
You can interact with it in real time. Click a tombstone to light a candle, leave a message, or vote to resurrect the project. These actions call the live API, and the 3D scene reacts immediately. It's theatrical without being cheesy.
Why This Matters in 2026
In 2026, side projects are more common than ever. The barrier to shipping is lower — you can deploy something live in minutes with platforms like Vercel. But the emotional complexity remains. Developers are juggling full-time work, open-source contributions, learning, and personal projects. Burnout is real. Projects fail for a thousand legitimate reasons.
DevGraveyard acknowledges that burnout and failure don't need to be shameful. They're part of being a developer. This tool lets you process that without pretending the project never happened.
The Technical Stack
For anyone curious about how it's built: the frontend is Next.js 14 with TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and shadcn/ui components. The backend uses Supabase for authentication (GitHub OAuth), database storage (PostgreSQL), and row-level security. The AI integration is Google Gemini. Deployment is on Vercel. The code is open source on GitHub under Varshithvhegde/devgraveyard.
A Public Memorial Wall
Buried projects join a public graveyard wall at /graveyard, where anyone can see all the memorials. You can sort by newest, most mourned (by candles lit), or most resurrection votes. There's a community aspect to it — strangers can light candles and leave RIP messages for projects that aren't even theirs. It's oddly wholesome.
Conclusion
DevGraveyard is funny and touching at the same time. On the surface, it's a joke about abandoned side projects. But underneath, it's built on respect for the work developers do, even when that work doesn't survive. It takes the grief seriously, the data seriously, and the goodbye seriously. That combination makes it work.
Merits
- Genuinely respectful treatment of a common developer experience
- Real data from your project makes each eulogy unique and personal
- The 3D graveyard is visually striking and fun to interact with
- Open source, so anyone can see how it's built
- Community features (candles, messages, resurrection votes) add real social meaning
- Clever use of AI that goes beyond generic templates
Demerits
- Limited to GitHub projects; other platforms not supported
- Requires GitHub OAuth login, which some developers may avoid
- The 3D cemetery could get slow if hundreds of projects are buried
- No way to "resurrect" a project back to active status, only vote for it
- Epitaphs are capped at 100 characters, which feels limiting for some thoughts
Caution
This article is educational and describes a real project as it existed on July 12, 2026. The technical stack, features, and live demo links are accurate as of that date. Any placeholder values (like example usernames or domains) should be replaced with actual values before relying on them. Readers should visit the source article and live demo to verify all claims before using the tool or rebuilding parts of it.
Frequently asked questions
- What AI model does DevGraveyard use? — The platform uses Google Gemini (gemini-2.5-flash) to write personalized eulogies for your buried projects.
- Can I bury multiple projects? — Yes, you can bury as many abandoned projects as you have. The system prevents burying the same repository twice.
- Is DevGraveyard open source? — Yes, the code is available on GitHub under Varshithvhegde/devgraveyard so anyone can see how it works or remix it.
- What data does it pull from GitHub? — The tool analyzes your full commit history to find peak obsession streaks, total commits, the best day ever, late-night sessions, and your final commit message.
- Can other people see my buried projects? — Yes, all buried projects appear on the public memorial wall at /graveyard, where strangers can leave messages and light candles.
- What's the 3D graveyard? — An interactive Three.js cemetery where you can click tombstones to interact with them in real time, light candles, and vote to resurrect projects.
- Do I need to have abandoned projects to try it? — Yes, you'll need a GitHub account with at least one repository to test DevGraveyard, though you can view the public graveyard without logging in.
- Is this just a joke project? — It's built with humor, but the technical execution and respect for your actual project data are completely genuine.
Tags
#side-projects #developer-tools #ai-eulogy #three-js #github #devgraveyard #passion-projects
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