Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?
I just wasted five months on an animation that would have been a kind of cool way to animate in a dialog https://steganographyjr.com/s2/index.html. I finally gave up after the hundredth time of thinking all the bugs were worked out only to find new bugs in a browser that I thought worked. When I think of all the actual work I could have gotten done in that time I feel a sense of true loss. I don't know how I threw myself so hard at something so stupid.
44 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 100.0 ms ] threadThis 5 months of trial and error is called learning.
Five months? Five months isn't anything.
at some point this degraded into "learn C/C++/OpenGL/direct x", which were good learning experiences, but the goal of making a game degraded into making game engines, none of which I ever finished.
I guess the moral of the story is that it's not really a failure if you learn something and keep your work archived somewhere.
After work I would typically spend a few hours a night hacking away at whatever feature I thought was a "must have". Suddenly the list of features that were absolutely needed to ship a 1.0 release grew quite long, and was too much to manage on my own.
I called it quits a few years ago at this point, but I wouldn't say I regret my decision to have put so much effort into a project. It gave me an opportunity to contribute to some high-profile libraries like Lucene.NET and Backbone, and I most certainly grew as a developer.
I wouldn't beat yourself up too hard, though. I'm sure you learned a whole lot about browser limitations, animation, and how to manage your time and expectations in the future. If you agree, then I'd say it wasn't a total loss at all.
I do a lot of small projects here and there. I'm currently working on one that I've been chipping away at for the last six months or so, but it's coming along at a much more relaxing pace.
While I do think that it's important to finish what you start, I also believe that knowing when to stop is just as valuable.
https://github.com/apache/lucenenet/blob/master/CHANGES.txt
It'd be a shame if they discontinued it! A lot of incredibly smart and dedicated folks have put their hearts and souls into that project.
See May 2018 here:
https://whimsy.apache.org/board/minutes/Lucene_Net.html
I mean, I guess I've spent ~15 years writing a text editor, depending upon how you think about the time span.
I enjoy making my own tools.
By the end I was knee deep in source code written by mathematicians (read: an absolute mess) trying to fix bugs in code that was not even used in the library, not sleeping, and not eating. I had completely lost my mind.
The taste of failure was bitter on my tongue after the first two failures, but by the last I was truly a shadow of myself. The only lesson I learned from the last failure is that my mind has a breaking point, which is very valuable to know and sense.
My two cents: learn from your failures even if the only lesson to be learned is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment.
They teach you about limits, they teach you where you over abstracted, they make you practice other skills (reading code, debugging, deployment, evaluating libraries, making technical decisions and trade-offs) you might not be fully consciously aware of all of this, but while you were building it, you were improving all of this.
your design on the site is top-notch, really good work. You have something to show for your time.
For us highly ambitious, it’s easy to get caught up in the negative aspects of why something didn’t succeed - but that’s only because the self doubt that us creators have (that is neccisary for us to critique our own work) needs to be kept on a leash.
You’re not one of the 99% of society eating Cheetos and watching TV all night, you’re building your skills. You have come out of this a better developer, and that is success in itself.
https://w3layouts.com/grocery-shoppy-ecommerce-bootstrap-res...
I had never got to the point where I focused on making the dialogs themselves look good. I spent all my time fixing the animation not aligning with the actual dialog and not being able to get an image to animate that wasn't blurry. By the end I had tacked on so much temporary code to work around those issues that changing anything was a guessing game.
I know you're right. I'm still looking for what I learned though.
There’s your lesson - in reality is something is not pixel perfect most users won’t notice and most of the ones that do notice won’t care.
You took it way too far down the rabbit hole, pushing resources (time etc) into things that don’t matter, you learnt this was a mistake, and you’ll never make that mistake again.
I learnt this lesson too - making the same mistakes you did. Every programmer learns this in one way or another.
You learnt better resource allocation.
Level up!
After 2 years of ups and downs as a sole founder, I got sick of it and moved on. Lesson learned, I should have stuck with it and figured out other ways to manage my burnout.
It’s still live and I spent over 2.5 years working on it as my sole project.
It was fun and I learned a lot through a plethora of mistakes, guides, YouTube videos and so on.
I wouldn’t change anything. I love that I spent so much time learning through AppLandr. I also made some $$$ but that’s another story!
Eventually, i realized that the purpose of the app was far too abstract, and while trying to figure that out i fell down the UI rabbit hole (i devved for iOS professionally at the time, but had never designed my own UI). Spent about 3 months trying out increasingly tiny UI/UX ideas until one day at a bar I was showing it to someone, and i just realized how stupid it all was, and shut it down.
I dont consider the time lost. I was able to chop up the app and open source some of the controls and widgets which helped me get another job. Also talking about the design process with my coworkers afterwards helped me figure out that iOS native is basically full stack dev, which got me to switch into backend and AI.
Overall a very positive experience, and the memory of committing to it helps encourage me to dump time into projects in the future (something I still do regularly).
- Crypto coins: understood how they worked on a basic level, trading stuff
- Python: including how to use decorators, unit tests
- Flask: a python web framework to be the web service side
- Pandas: a python data analysis library to get insights on the crypto behavior
- MongoDB: configured and used the service as the database of the whole app
- Microservices: I had the chance to work with microservices for the first time
- Telegram Bot API: Discovered how to basic stuff
Without a doubt, this made me a better professional, even though I don't work with Python on my job.
I'm sure you learned a lot during you project and now you can see things from a different perspective than before, so you didn't waste five months.