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.
Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?
1–10 of 45 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?
#2Yes 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.
Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?
#3Yes 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.
That's what I thought, lol.
Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?
#4The 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.
Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?
#5Yes 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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?
#6My wife keeps reminding me that I started building the shed 7 years ago.
Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?
#7I'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.
Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?
#8I 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.
Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?
#9I 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.
Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?
#10I 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.
A text editor? Why? That's an interesting thing to work on.