Yet another project I will never complete

Few weeks ago I had an idea for an app, so naturally I started searching for a similar one on Google and I didn’t find anything, I even spoke with some of my friends about it and they didn’t mention anything that they were aware of anything similar, so I got excited and started planning my efforts in developing it, I even took a week of vacation from work to focus on that. The idea was a time tracking app for developers, it would work by users installing a plugin into their IDE and then the plugin would periodically upload the metrics to a backend which would provide the users with dashboard and analytics. Some of you might know that such a thing already exists and it’s called Wakatime , I didn’t know that, and now that I’ve learned about it I’ve decided to scrap my project, as this one does pretty much the same things as I had in mind, and the traction behind it is pretty decent which would make it difficult for me to compete.

But this is just another rock on a mountain of projects that I’ve thrown into the bin, it’s quite an interesting situation that many developers have found themselves in, maybe we all just have ADHD and only some of us manage to fight it, although I understand the feeling of excitement when you run git init and it’s wonderful. Either way, after an initial disheartening and disappointing feeling, I’m actually quite happy about the things I’ve learned in my few weeks of half (or more like quarter) working on this project.

Firstly and most obviously, I didn’t spend enough time searching for already existing solutions. In hindsight, Wakatime was an obvious find, it’s not like they didn’t do their SEO, but I just should have invested more of my time in investigating rather then quickly jumping into development, especially considering how much time I was planning to devote to that project. I did have an inkling more investigation was needed, but maybe I didn’t want to find anything because I was so happy with my idea and thought it would be a great thing to work on. Next time, thought, more exploration before committing.

Secondly, I’ve made it much more difficult then it should have been by using stack that I wasn’t familiar with, my plan with the project was also to get back to Golang a bit and to learn SvelteKit for the frontend, even though I also had to learn IntelliJ plugin framework as well, and with all that I still planned my time as if I was using a very familiar stack where I can find solutions quickly. This was a big problem, because it was difficult to keep myself motivated when there were so many unknowns in the development process.

Thirdly, I’ve learned a bit more about myself and what motivates me and how to hack around that to achieve my goals more easily. Giving myself small tasks that contribute to a big goal which I was tracking in a Notion board was a very useful thing which kept me focused when I needed it. I’ve also invested time into planning out my day in the morning, this is a more general advice, but it worked great on this project as well.

There we go, even though the pile of dead projects has grown by one more, I’m feeling good about the things I’ve learned so I’m still happy about it all in general. Next project might fare a bit better.