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Ask HN: A project you gave up on? (time, cost, you were not smart/ready enough )

by casper345 on 12/26/18, 4:26 PM with 7 comments

• by TheGrumpyBrit on 12/27/18, 10:34 AM

  I haven't given up on it yet, but my hobby project is a portal for free live music gigs in my local area. It's working well enough on Wordpress, but real life always seems to get in the way of my attempts to move it to a standalone product. Probably because it's always my go-to project when I want to learn something new, so I've ended up with multiple unsatisfactory versions because I've not had any experience with the language/framework.

• by existencebox on 12/26/18, 6:05 PM

  I'm not sure this counts; since I less "Gave up on" and more "figured it was done enough for what little time I had to work on it as a personal toy; to my later regret," but...

  Maybe 4-5 years ago I wrote this. https://github.com/Gehn/JustADistributedVPL (I uploaded it to github ~2 years back on the request from a friend who wanted to use it.)

  It was a hobby project to control the raspberry pis around the house by giving me a visual programming language to connect programmatic modules in a graph via a web UX, including allowing networked hops between nodes. IFTTT for IOT.

  I thought I was being derivative even at that point given yahoo pipes and some similar concepts, but having seen the IOT control/home automation boom since then (and the many products who later moved far past what I had been thinking of), I do feel like there might have been opportunities to be ahead of the curve there.

• by thrifter on 12/26/18, 6:26 PM

  The world's first search engine for sales tax (in Canada): http://isittaxed.com. I have over 10K goods and services in the database, for all provinces and territories in Canada. All told, it has cost me almost 4K to develop. Monetizing it has been more difficult than I thought.

• by jatins on 12/26/18, 5:54 PM

  I worked on project to make any database with a change log realtime (like Firebase) https://gist.github.com/jatins/11aac836f25257148a1d61def2c72...

  Ultimately, when you are building a developer oriented product even an MVP needs to be confidence inspiring, which needs money and people, didn't have much of either. And couldn't get much investor interest just on the basis of alpha - they either need traction, or someone to vouch for you.

• by happppy on 12/27/18, 9:21 AM

  I have some vague ideas. One idea was a fb integrated music app, but after fb scandals I just gave up that idea. I didn't invested on it at all. I am not sure many people will use it after fb scandals.

• by pontifier on 12/26/18, 7:26 PM

  You mean every project I've ever worked on?