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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?

#31

Post by krapp »

shoo wrote: post #27
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.

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.

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

#32

Post by gitgud »

jason_slack wrote: post #11
nobody271 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you released or opensourced the text editor? Sounds like a cool tool!

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

#33

Post by gitgud »

throwaway413 wrote: post #25
nobody271 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#34

Post by powerslacker »

jason_slack wrote: post #11
nobody271 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#35

Post by jason_slack »

powerslacker wrote: post #34
jason_slack wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

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

#36

Post by jason_slack »

gitgud wrote: post #32
jason_slack wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you released or opensourced the text editor? Sounds like a cool tool!

See my reply to @powerslacker.

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

#37

Post by 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).

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

#38

Post by nobody271 »

InboxZeroEmail wrote: post #30

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 $$$…

disqualified! That sounds like a success to me.

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

#39

Post by throwaway413 »

gitgud wrote: post #33
throwaway413 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

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

#40

Post by Griever »

Someone1234 wrote: post #22
Griever wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Aw man, what a bummer :(
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