Ask HN: What did you fail to finish in 2023? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What did you fail to finish in 2023?

13 pointsdirtybirdnj22 comments

Hello and good tidings fellow HN readers,

Please share stories of ways you / yourself / your team / someone you were watching really blew it up / didn't make a deadline / otherwise failed in this past year.

Why am I asking?

The end of this year was a frantic ~2 month sprint to finish a personal project before the end of the year. It's not gonna happen. I have to stop and reset, figure out how it will finish in January. In the grand scheme it's not a big deal but I'm still upset.

I left details of my project out of this because they don't matter. I know I'm not the only one who has tried to reach a goal and failed, so please share your story.

Let us revel in our Sisyphean techno-masochism as we seek to push our limits (or just survive) and fail.

Happy New Year, I hope your 2024 trash fires burn bright and your successes are just around the corner.

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Well, quite a few projects both at work and for personal hobbies.

At work:

My team failed to finish developing a marketing subsite for the company which originally had a November deadline. This was part because things weren't planned out properly and the requirements weren't clear (they wanted it as a micro frontend, but didn't say that until it had been mostly built out in the existing CMS), and partly because they kept changing their mind on features (the designers redesigned everything in the middle of December).

In My Personal Life:

I had various YouTube videos go unfinished, for a multitude of reasons. Sometimes it was burn out, sometimes it was either myself or the thumbnail designer falling ill, and sometimes it was... due to difficulties in the recording process.

I also wanted to get another demo ready for the game I was working on, but it seems like that's not happening. This is partially due to a lot of real life things coming up at the same time, and partially due to the fact I find it really hard to keep my ambitions in check or build out stuff using temporary graphics until I can find/comission the final ones.

Wanted to put at least a couple of decent projects on my resume. People say that they don't matter but since I wasn't getting a lot of traction, I thought it would be a good idea. After a lot of procrastination and half-tried ideas, I still have nothing worth sharing.

The personal project I talked about, I have built and rebuilt it like, 4-6 times now? #1 was absolutely pathetic and looks nothing like #7, which looks much more professional and legitimate.

If you look at each one of these in isolation it's easy to call them a failure.

If you look at them as a string of punctuated events where a determined person kept trying, despite failure, and then regrouped and tried again... well that's entirely different.

I hope you can find something from these ideas to be proud of. Even if that one of them got you to the next due to growth / learning / exploration.

I encourage you to find a piece of your work that can exist in a standalone way and publish that so you have SOMETHING to show for your efforts. You deserve it even if your brain tells you that you don't.

Being willing to publish your stuff is scary. I'm guilty of that too.

I participated in NaNoWriMo this year (first time attempting at a novel as well). Managed to hit 20K words, but the story went nowhere and I lost interest by the end. Might pick it up again someday again.

If the doubling the word count seems daunting, you can try rewriting your 20k words into a short story and still get something out of it.

If you're anything like me you'll probably never return to finishing the novel and it'll rot on your hard-drive for years to come. At least if you package it up as a short story it'll be just as rewarding as a completed NaNoWriMo.

Then if you're happy with it you can still publish the short as a kindle ebook (Which can probably be completed by the end of January and you'll start off the new year accomplishing significant.)

Thanks for the encouragement :)

We didn't accomplish a launch in 2023. Not a failure, but a little disappointment. More to come in 2024 tho! :)

Stay optimistic HN readers. 2024 will be the year :crossfingers:

This will be the year!

I haven't learned VHDL, designed a chip, and submitted it to the Google chip shuttle. I've started looking at VHDL, and it's not as knarly as I thought. The chip itself might only be 2 pages of code when I'm done.

Seriously... a grid of cells consisting of a 4bitx4 look up table RAM, with latched outputs, and 2 phased clock. How long could it be?

Serious question, how exactly does one get started designing chips?

I have a rudimentary understanding of circuits, like wire up LED with resistor to 12v, or making a voltage dividing circuit to not fry things.

Is it a density thing? What else makes one go "I have so much stuff, lets put it on a die"

I find what you do fascinating. Hardware engineering is modern magic. Yer a wizard mike!

I’m on my 7th year of a personal project that I thought I’d gotten everything square on. Mid-November (it’s a Christmas-related project) I discovered a critical issue. Like, fundamentally broken in its primary purpose.

So it’s another year for that. I don’t think it’s a hardware problem, but I’m not sure. So here’s to Christmas 2024.

Man, I hit the same kind of snag twice with my store thing. Got so close to the end, started to plot my path to the finish line and just realized it wasn't going to work.

This thread was very cathartic. It's helpful to see others fighting the same fight. I hope you can take another stab at it in 2024. We can do it.

I failed to publish on Github 1x per day on average. Just couldn't get into it. (I do my dev locally.)

I didn't get to fly fish at all, like I wanted.

I thought about buying an electric minibike for my boys (and me!), and think it's probably best that it didn't get done.

tell me more about the fly fishing!

the project I'm working on is actually a website / store for vertical jigging lures I use to target lake trout.

Making lures myself and dialing in stuff that works better than what I started with scratches several itches: fishing, engineering, artistic.

I especially like using a horizontal graph to find and target them, some scoff at "video game" fishing but it is way more exciting and fun than trolling imo.

Instant Reaction (to title): Nothing...yet.

I like the optimism. You still have time! There's so many hours left in 2023 to get into trouble :)

Understand FormData Web API. It's so weird that it's really hard to process all kind of FormData format.

The game "second life" - it's really a neverending story :(

Lots of failures (Founder of a bootstrapped B2B SAAS):

- Growth was terrible. Didn't hit our numbers that I had in mind. And these were conservative numbers so its pathetic personally.

- Failed to build a good CSM team but still have some good leads in pipeline. Working on it but it was a 2023 target which did not get achieved

- In general, lot of hiring failures. This shit is hard and when bootstrapped even harder because you can only stretch the dollar so much and you have to be really picky without unlimited VC funds. Totally on me overall.

- On personal front, failed to ride my motorcycle more than 100 miles and my target was to hit 500 miles.

- Did not work out as much as I wanted to and continue to be lazy in hitting the gym compared.

Having said this, we had lot of successes too which has got me excited for 2024 but since this post was mostly about failures, I won't list the successes here :). Happy 2024 in advance.

Thanks for sharing. I wouldn't consider "failures" as learning experiences, as I'm sure you are too.

W.r.t hiring, I can share some thing that really worked for me: Engineering: I've had great success with giving prospects who pass the initial screen, a small real world problem or user story in our codebase. No NDA, just show them a User Story, and ask them how they'd go about it. And just listen. Make it interactive. For example, I'd deliberately leave out a couple of details in User Story. So if the Engineer starts solutioning rightaway that's a red flag.

I've also shown snippets of code that has a simple bug, and asked them to "read" the code and figure out what might be wrong. The best engineers are ones who can read and understand other people's code also, in addition to their own.

Wishing you the best, in the next iteration of your entrepreneurial adventure!

Thx. Appreciate your insights.

The way you conduct the interviews sounds humane and respectful. Thank you for sharing that.

It's interesting how "treat it as real as possible" is the best advice for both parties to have the best possible outcome. As an interviewee I've found that the more divorced from the actual work the interview challenge is, the "spicier" the engagement is overall.

I was part of an org that was having trouble hiring people. To help with this, they decided to obfuscate the stack used because several candidates gave up after trying to use the tool the team (who had all left) settled on ~10yrs ago. "Just don't tell them we use X" was the decision management made. At some point the people left holding the bag will have ask why and you will owe them an explanation of why this wasn't discussed from the beginning.

It took me a while to figure out why I think the way you are doing things is important to me, I hope that makes sense.

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