
Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on? - nobody271
I just wasted five months on an animation that would have been a kind of cool way to animate in a dialog https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steganographyjr.com&#x2F;s2&#x2F;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&#x27;t know how I threw myself so hard at something so stupid.
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malux85
Hey nobody271 - don’t be so hard on yourself. Working on failed personal
projects is a rite of passage for programmers, and believe it or not, failed
projects are important

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.

~~~
nobody271
That's not my design, lol. I just grabbed a template off the internet so that
I had something to work with.

[https://w3layouts.com/grocery-shoppy-ecommerce-bootstrap-
res...](https://w3layouts.com/grocery-shoppy-ecommerce-bootstrap-responsive-
web-template/)

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.

~~~
malux85
Did you learn that getting animations exactly right and pixel perfect is an
extremely challenging job, and is almost impossible to get working across all
resolutions, all devices and all conditions without an exceptional amount of
work?

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!

------
colvasaur
3.5 years if you consider my MSc a personal project. There were three hallmark
technical failures that are summarized as follows: (a) a computational failure
-- at one point I needed to iteratively generate a 3 TB matrix, (b) a
mathematical failure -- I made a math mistake, and (c) a software failure -- I
tried to use a falsely advertised library to solve the above two problems.

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment).

~~~
sgillen
I'm very curious and would like to know more about what you were trying to do,
what did you need a 3TB matrix for?

~~~
colvasaur
PDE constrained optimization. I was optimizing for many hundreds of thousands
of parameters. I only needed the diagonal of the Jacobian by the end of the
calculation, however it was necessary to build the full dense matrix first
without rewriting massive parts of the logic.

~~~
tasseff
I am also working on PDE-constrained optimization. What was the library that
was falsely advertised?

------
HeyLaughingBoy
My wife keeps reminding me that I started building the shed 7 years ago.

------
Griever
I spent about three years working on a webapp for simplifying the RFQ process,
specifically for defense projects. Ultimately I decided to finally call it
quits on the app when I realized that even if I built this thing, I'd never
have the skills/time/patience to sell it. Wish I had realized that sooner!

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.

~~~
Someone1234
Little off topic: Seems like Lucene.NET is being discontinued. They're
discussing putting it into Apache's attic in the mailing list. It hasn't been
updated for at least two years so this isn't super surprising, and they'd need
to update it to .Net Core which nobody wants to do.

~~~
Griever
I admittedly haven't looked at it since I gave up on my personal project, so
I'm not entirely sure of it's state. However, a quick glance at the changelog
seems to indicate that it supports .NetCore in some fashion.

[https://github.com/apache/lucenenet/blob/master/CHANGES.txt](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.

~~~
Someone1234
Right but even that "beta" has been stuck for a year.

See May 2018 here:

[https://whimsy.apache.org/board/minutes/Lucene_Net.html](https://whimsy.apache.org/board/minutes/Lucene_Net.html)

~~~
Griever
Aw man, what a bummer :(

------
jason_slack
I have hundreds of personal projects that I pick up, work on, then put down.
Then when I neeed that project to do something additional, I pick it back up
again, add to it, put down. Move on to the next one.

I mean, I guess I've spent ~15 years writing a text editor, depending upon how
you think about the time span.

~~~
nobody271
A text editor? Why? That's an interesting thing to work on.

~~~
jason_slack
I guess I always preferred things my way, for how I work. It's not only a text
editor (i.e source code, markdown, etc, etc), it technically can open PDF's
and Word documents and write back. I can open Excel docs and then write c++
lambda style code behind each cell to do whatever. I can work with my GitHub
repos and make PR's, merge, branch, etc.

I enjoy making my own tools.

~~~
powerslacker
That sounds pretty good. Open source? I'd love to read it, and possibly
contribute if its in my skill set.

~~~
jason_slack
It is all c++, works on macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD. I could open-source
it. I'd have to spend a bit of time tidying everything up. It actually has
quite a lot of dependencies on each platform.

------
oriel
I had an idea for an iOS app years back that i spent about 6 months
developing. It was technically challenging and technically possible, which
made it appealing. I'd dump 2-4 hours after work and more on the weekends into
it.

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).

------
luizfzs
I spent 5 months on a personal crypto trading/analytics platform and I have no
regrets. During that time I learned:

\- 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.

------
dirktheman
You didn't waste 5 months, you spent 5 months learning! You could have watched
TV reruns, mindless scrolling through Facebook or ranting on Twitter. But
instead, you spent 5 months learning new skills and finding out what DOESN'T
work.

------
tmaly
I spent 1.5 years on my food app bestfoodnearme.com but found restaurants
really do not have a lot of margin to spend extra money. Project is still
running on DO and only runs me $20 a month. I did teach myself Go and still
benefit from it. I also go better at Postgresql and server upgrades.

------
krapp
I'd mention my attempt at cloning a simple video game (Berzerk) that I started
two years ago, which has only wound up with my having built, destroyed,
rebuilt, scrapped and rebuilt an ECS framework, but technically I haven't
given up on it yet because I decided I should just make Pong instead, because
if I can't manage Pong then what am I even doing, and so I'm working on Lua
bindings for SDL for ... reasons. Research, that's what it is.

Five months? Five months isn't anything.

~~~
shoo
my most productive time writing games was using some proprietary scripting
thing (dark basic), back when I didn't know how to do anything else

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.

~~~
krapp
To be fair to myself, I probably have a lot of useful code, I just haven't
used it for anything.

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.

------
InboxZeroEmail
I used to work on a project called AppLandr - which allowed one to create
landing pages for their projects via a drag and drop interface.

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!

~~~
nobody271
disqualified! That sounds like a success to me.

~~~
InboxZeroEmail
I didn't make much money for the time I put in - I would call it a failure in
that regard!

------
quickthrower2
The lesson learned is to stop and think "is what I am working on now worth the
time". I do waste time sometimes but normally end of day or lunch time make me
reflect on the value of what I am doing. Getting out of the coding zone and
into the self managing zone if you will.

------
ezekg
I spent over 2 years on a CLI and desktop app for local WP development that
went pretty much nowhere. It was a frustrating time to put so much effort into
something that failed.

------
throwaway413
I spent 2 years working on my second to last side project before giving up.
I’m now 1 year into my current full-time “side project”

~~~
nobody271
What was the side project that you gave up on?

~~~
throwaway413
It was a hosted checkout platform for digital service providers, built on top
of Stripe, called BillTo (was [http://bill.to](http://bill.to)). I managed to
launch an MVP, gain a few customers, and processed ~$40k transaction volume
before shutting it down.

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.

~~~
gitgud
Sounds like a roller coaster is that $40k in 2 years?... Still more money than
any side project made me....

~~~
throwaway413
That was just transaction volume on the platform - I made ~$750 on that after
my costs (charging processing fees). The $40k occurred within about a 3 month
range after working on it for 1.5 years, and then as my burnout kicked in,
volume fizzled out for the final 3 months I put into it before quitting.

------
philip142au
Yes its cool but your time-frame of 5 months is a bit excessive, it could have
been done in a day by the right person.

~~~
jjoe
I don't agree. The right person most likely had spent 5 months prior to get to
the point of being able to do it in a day.

This 5 months of trial and error is called learning.

------
jklein11
Why are you giving up? It looks like you are pretty close!

~~~
nobody271
Because it's been pretty close for months. I fix one thing and instantly
discover something else that needs fixed. Those temporary fixes are all built
on top of each other and I started seeing some undefined behavior as a result.
It might be almost there but I've had nothing but it's almost there moments
for the last several months. I've got far more interesting projects that I've
been neglecting for this thing so ...I guess you could say it went outside of
an unreasonably large time box.

