Ask HN: A project you gave up on? (time, cost, you were not smart/ready enough ) - casper345
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csnewb
I was given a take home project to complete as part of an interview process
for one company. I was given 48 hours to implement a basic chat server in
Golang. I didn't know Golang, but the hiring manager thought it'd be a good
challenge to see how quickly I learn new things and deliver results. I spent
an entire weekend learning Go and tried to be honest about using only 48 hours
to write the application. I wasn't given any skeleton code, had to implement
the whole thing from scratch. I never made an entire web app from scratch
especially in language I wasn't familiar with so the learning experience felt
like drinking from a firehose. I learned a ton but couldn't complete the
project because it was a bit too much on top of my full-time job and going
through interviews with other companies, so I submitted my barely functioning
code in shame and knew that was automatic rejection right there. I wonder if
I'm just a shitty developer or if given enough time I would have been able to
make it work.

~~~
mortivore
Maybe it's just me, but I'm not sure what the point of take home projects like
that is. Like my first instinct for something like this is to Google it. Guess
what happens when I do google "chat server in golang"? I get a bunch of
examples. So do I just copy them/strip them down/combine the examples or do I
try to code this thing from scratch with no examples? Guess which I would do
in an actual job?

No, you're not a shitty dev. I'm sure given enough time you would have gotten
it. Take home projects are weird. They are better than the whiteboarding imo,
but only barely.

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lichtenberger
I almost gave up the work on [http://sirix.io](http://sirix.io). But somehow
still motivated to bring forth the idea of a versioned storage system capable
of supporting temporal, analytical tasks. That is storing and querying
snapshots of data in O(log n). Still, sometimes it's frustrating to spend so
much spare time and probably noone is using it. More than once I thought why
am I doing it, but somehow it struck me back then in the university and I
loved the project. And hey, it was a lot of fun to build an asynchronous,
RESTful-API in Vert.x and Kotlin now, and maybe it's going to help someone
once I build the JSON layer besides XML (shouldn't be that much work after
all). In essence it's just which records we are going to be stored.

But sorry, didn't mean to advertise...

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dpcx
Online fuel tracking system, that would allow you to compare your vehicle's
fuel economy with others around the world. I spent too much time trying to get
the data model just the way I wanted it, fuelly.com came along and ate my
lunch.

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java-man
Secure digital archive - locally encrypted archive (text search, image
preview, tagging) with a cloud backup.

The market appears to be too small, the majority of people are ok with google
photos and the like.

[https://goryachev.com/products/secure-
archive/index.html](https://goryachev.com/products/secure-archive/index.html)

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java-man
Software localization/translation service, aimed at developers and
translators. Failed to take off.

[https://goryachev.com/products/localizer/index.html](https://goryachev.com/products/localizer/index.html)

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java-man
Personalized news recommendation service. People are ok with regular news and
the Economist.

[https://news-ai.com/](https://news-ai.com/)

------
snyena
Running my own online sports betting company.

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MentallyRetired
SongScraps, a site and app I had developed for songwriters. A lot of writers
come up with one line at a time, or a piece of a song or concept, so it was a
way to organize those scraps and then assemble them into a song.

The app I had built was built on titanium appcelerator at the time, and both a
new phone release and a new titanium release meant I would have had to recode
the entire app. So, I closed it down instead.

Side note: I like to think I pioneered flat design with this site. Not as a
concept really, but I was just tired of skeumorphic site design so I made
everything simple.

