20 months, 2K hours, 200K € lost. A story about resilience and sunk cost fallacy

• Wicked Pdf

  6 3,516 7.0 Ruby

  PDF generator (from HTML) plugin for Ruby on Rails

Thanks for sharing - it takes a lot to share these sort of personal experiences. I've definitely been there, too.

Aside from all the good and valid comments about reducing scope and shipping an MVP, I'd like to raise another point which may be controversial (or even wrong), but still worth raising:

Would it have been different if you had used Rails? A few of the problems you mention (rich text editing, validation, and to some extend, pdf exports) are very easily solved in Rails. Take rich text editing: It's literally a couple minutes to use ActionText. Or validations / forms, there's really not much work to do. PDF exports are also not too hard via wicked_pdf [1] if you're okay with fixing some formatting quirks later on.

I've seen both worlds by writing tons of JS / React code myself, and at that time (2016-2018) those problems were almost an order of magnitude more time-costly to implement in SPAs. I remember react-router.. not great memories.

Of course, all the points reducing MVP scope still hold, yadda yadda, but.. if you could have had all those features (nearly) for free, would you be at another stage now? Who knows.

[1] https://github.com/mileszs/wicked_pdf

• StORMi

  3 0 3.4 Java

  Shujutech Object Relational Mapping Interface, the only Java ORM that fully supports all OO concepts.

It's safer to use relational db for all business applications since transactions integrity is required most of the time. To reduce complexity, check out:

https://github.com/shujutech/StORMi

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

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