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

I was given a take home project to complete as part of an interview process for one company. I was given 48 hours to implement a basic chat server in Golang. I didn't know Golang, but the hiring manager thought it'd be a good challenge to see how quickly I learn new things and deliver results. I spent an entire weekend learning Go and tried to be honest about using only 48 hours to write the application. I wasn't given any skeleton code, had to implement the whole thing from scratch. I never made an entire web app from scratch especially in language I wasn't familiar with so the learning experience felt like drinking from a firehose. I learned a ton but couldn't complete the project because it was a bit too much on top of my full-time job and going through interviews with other companies, so I submitted my barely functioning code in shame and knew that was automatic rejection right there. I wonder if I'm just a shitty developer or if given enough time I would have been able to make it work.

I almost gave up the work on http://sirix.io. But somehow still motivated to bring forth the idea of a versioned storage system capable of supporting temporal, analytical tasks. That is storing and querying snapshots of data in O(log n). Still, sometimes it's frustrating to spend so much spare time and probably noone is using it. More than once I thought why am I doing it, but somehow it struck me back then in the university and I loved the project. And hey, it was a lot of fun to build an asynchronous, RESTful-API in Vert.x and Kotlin now, and maybe it's going to help someone once I build the JSON layer besides XML (shouldn't be that much work after all). In essence it's just which records we are going to be stored.

But sorry, didn't mean to advertise...

Online fuel tracking system, that would allow you to compare your vehicle's fuel economy with others around the world. I spent too much time trying to get the data model just the way I wanted it, fuelly.com came along and ate my lunch.

Secure digital archive - locally encrypted archive (text search, image preview, tagging) with a cloud backup.

The market appears to be too small, the majority of people are ok with google photos and the like.

https://goryachev.com/products/secure-archive/index.html

Software localization/translation service, aimed at developers and translators. Failed to take off.

https://goryachev.com/products/localizer/index.html

Personalized news recommendation service. People are ok with regular news and the Economist.

https://news-ai.com/

Running my own online sports betting company.

SongScraps, a site and app I had developed for songwriters. A lot of writers come up with one line at a time, or a piece of a song or concept, so it was a way to organize those scraps and then assemble them into a song.

The app I had built was built on titanium appcelerator at the time, and both a new phone release and a new titanium release meant I would have had to recode the entire app. So, I closed it down instead.

Side note: I like to think I pioneered flat design with this site. Not as a concept really, but I was just tired of skeumorphic site design so I made everything simple.