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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?

#21

Post by malux85 »

nobody271 wrote: post #20
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…

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!

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

#22

Post by Someone1234 »

Griever wrote: post #15
Someone1234 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

See May 2018 here:

https://whimsy.apache.org/board/minutes/Lucene_Net.html

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

#25

Post by throwaway413 »

nobody271 wrote: post #24
throwaway413 wrote: post #23

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”

What was the side project that you gave up on?

It was a hosted checkout platform for digital service providers, built on top of Stripe, called BillTo (was 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.

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

#26

Post by tasseff »

colvasaur wrote: post #18
sgillen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#27

Post by shoo »

krapp wrote: post #7

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. Researc…

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.

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

#29

Post by 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.

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

#30

Post by 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!

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