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Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?

#11

Post by jason_slack »

nobody271 wrote: post #10
jason_slack wrote: post #9

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.

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

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.

Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?

#12

Post by nobody271 »

Griever wrote: post #8

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"…

Are you hesitent to take on new projects now? Part of the reason I kept trying was a resolution to finish my projects.

Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?

#13

Post by Someone1234 »

Griever wrote: post #8

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"…

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.

Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?

#14

Post by 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.

Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?

#15

Post by Griever »

Someone1234 wrote: post #13
Griever wrote: post #8

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"…

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.

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

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.

Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?

#16

Post by Griever »

nobody271 wrote: post #12
Griever wrote: post #8

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"…

Are you hesitent to take on new projects now? Part of the reason I kept trying was a resolution to finish my projects.

Not entirely. I do approach new projects with a bit more scrutiny than before, which I consider to be a good thing.

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.

Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?

#17

Post by sgillen »

colvasaur wrote: post #14

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 c…

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?

Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?

#18

Post by colvasaur »

sgillen wrote: post #17
colvasaur wrote: post #14

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 c…

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?

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.

Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?

#19

Post by 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.

Re: Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?

#20

Post by nobody271 »

malux85 wrote: post #19

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 aw…

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...

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.

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