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

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

#41

Post by InboxZeroEmail » Sun, Dec 02, 2018, 11:44 AM UTC

nobody271 wrote: post #38

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.

I didn't make much money for the time I put in - I would call it a failure in that regard!

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

#42

Post by jklein11 » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 1:38 PM UTC

Why are you giving up? It looks like you are pretty close!

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

#43

Post by dirktheman » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 2:40 PM UTC

You didn't waste 5 months, you spent 5 months learning! You could have watched TV reruns, mindless scrolling through Facebook or ranting on Twitter. But instead, you spent 5 months learning new skills and finding out what DOESN'T work.

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

#44

Post by luizfzs » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 4:04 PM UTC

I spent 5 months on a personal crypto trading/analytics platform and I have no regrets. During that time I learned:

- Crypto coins: understood how they worked on a basic level, trading stuff

- Python: including how to use decorators, unit tests

- Flask: a python web framework to be the web service side

- Pandas: a python data analysis library to get insights on the crypto behavior

- MongoDB: configured and used the service as the database of the whole app

- Microservices: I had the chance to work with microservices for the first time

- Telegram Bot API: Discovered how to basic stuff

Without a doubt, this made me a better professional, even though I don't work with Python on my job.

I'm sure you learned a lot during you project and now you can see things from a different perspective than before, so you didn't waste five months.

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

#45

Post by nobody271 » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 4:36 PM UTC

jklein11 wrote: post #42

Why are you giving up? It looks like you are pretty close!

Because it's been pretty close for months. I fix one thing and instantly discover something else that needs fixed. Those temporary fixes are all built on top of each other and I started seeing some undefined behavior as a result. It might be almost there but I've had nothing but it's almost there moments for the last several months. I've got far more interesting projects that I've been neglecting for this thing so ...I guess you could say it went outside of an unreasonably large time box.