Our great sponsors
-
SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
-
pqm
Physical Quantities and Measures (PQM) is a Node and browser package for dealing with numbers with units
-
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
Not exactly a fail, but something I expected at least comments: https://github.com/marcodiegomesquita/rtti
I tried to build StackOverflow for flashcards (i.e. spaced repetition with collaboration as a first class feature.) After working on it on nights/weekends for ~2 years, I realized my architecture was shit. I started out with Blazor + F# + PostGres, but eventually I realized that syncing offline client DBs to the cloud was a very nontrivial problem. So I moved to event sourcing. Turns out that's not much better - I started to write my own IndexedDB wrapper, then said "you're a moron" and switched to CouchDb/PouchDb/RxDB. I also wanted to support plugins. I thought I figured that out with Blazor, but eventually I realized that more powerful plugins would want to manipulate the DOM directly. Blazor's virtual DOM kills that possibility. So, I'm off the dotnet ecosystem (I can't express how very, very sad I am to leave F#) and onto Typescript + SolidJS. I would've gone ReScript but that's tightly coupled to React which uses the VDom. Perhaps I should be using Svelte - I'm not solid on any of this new architecture yet. So my project has not yet entirely failed... I just realized I spent ~2 years on the wrong architecture.
The carcass of my attempt in dotnet: https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow
I built Boltstream [0] over the course of a couple years and got burned out. I wouldn't say it was actually a failed project because in the back of my mind I never really had any intention of trying to turn it into a Twitch/YouTube/Facebook Live competitor anyway. And it's proven to be somewhat popular on Github. The project was fun to build and learn about but ultimately it was impossible to actually run it as a consumer-facing website. The problems were never the actual software/video streaming tech, but rather the extreme bandwidth costs of live video streaming, and the content itself. I launched it several times under different site names/products and it always just turned into a cesspool of pirate streaming live sports and other copyrighted content. The DMCA notices were regular, but were never really that onerous to deal with. Just turn the stream off, ban the account, and then reply to the email. But it just got too annoying. I built a little mobile web app so I could just do it from my phone while I was out at dinner. After awhile I just decided that it was time to give it to someone else to play with. So I did a big code dump on Github and haven't touched it since.
I've actually started working on it a little bit more recently since it seems that "self hosted video streaming" is still pretty in-demand. I'm probably not going to be spending too much time on the actual features and functionality since that's pretty much done at this point. Mostly just packaging it up so it's easier for people to run it themselves and hack on it.
[0] https://github.com/benwilber/boltstream
I made a spreadsheet add-on similar to the pint library for python (dimensional analysis) based on my own open source JS library (https://github.com/GhostWrench/pqm). Website is still up: https://ghostwrench.net/convertplus.html.
To me it seemed like the perfect way to get a solo app up and running because Google was going to run all the sever stuff and I could just cash in. The app never really got off the ground and by the time I realized that Big G really doesn’t want to make it easy for any schmuck to run a profit generating app using their servers and their technology and it wasn’t worth the maintenance effort to keep up with the constant requests to update the app. I think it is no longer available on the GSuite store as of a few months ago. I think my biggest mistakes were as follows:
1) I needed a business/marketing oriented co-founder. I underestimated how difficult that job is and overestimated my ability to do it.
2) I wanted to charge too much for the app. I didn’t want to undersell myself and get caught in a trap of not making enough to keep up with maintenance. I went too far the other way. I think maybe a $50-$60 on time charge would have been appropriate, instead of requiring a subscription. This is an easy fix, but I would had to re-do my marketing effort and see #1
3) Built before I tested the market. I convinced myself that just asking a few of my engineering friend would use it was enough. Again, this is probably a symptom of #1
4) I was mentally unprepared to deal with failure and I lost motivation to keep working on the project when things didn’t go as I expected.
5) I underestimated how much people actually use spreasheet add-ons. There really isn’t a thriving market and most of the really popular apps are a utility attached to another popular standalone project.
6) Probably should have targeted Excel rather than Sheets, because the market is simply bigger.
I think if the stars align, I would like to give this project another go. I don’t think it has totally failed rather than just gone dormant, but I need a better strategy for round 2!
My project was a 3d in-browser escape velocity clone (think Endless Sky.) It ended up with an impressive feature set, mediocre graphics, not nearly enough world, no real game loop, and no players: http://flythrough.space
My mistake was building it totally in secret for most of its life. I worked on it for years focusing on adding features that maybe nobody wanted without validating the product/market fit or generating any buzz. By the time I was "ready" someone had gained way more steam on their own EV remake, even getting the author of Override to endorse it, so the fact that I had a working prototype didn't really matter, the community that I thought would be receptive wasn't interested.
I learned that you need to build something worth playing first, including some kind of game loop, before you try to get people to play it. Turns out noodling around with a hacky prototype isn't something people find exciting even if the whole community is centered around noodling around with mods and hacking. People won't mod a game they don't love in the first place.
Since this project, I've committed to building smaller prototypes and validating concepts before I go all-in on building something polished and content rich, and thought I haven't shipped anything this big since, I have met my personal goals.
Full retrospective: http://blog.eamonnmr.com/2020/08/flythrough-space-retrospect...
The conclusion: http://blog.eamonnmr.com/2020/04/dont-remake-an-old-game/
