What did you fail to finish in 2023?

Question

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.

CM30 · Accepted Answer

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.

sk11001 · Answer

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.

asicsp · Answer

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.

v_hacker · Answer

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:

mikewarot · Answer

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?

sircastor · Answer

I&rsquo;m on my 7th year of a personal project that I thought I&rsquo;d gotten everything square on. Mid-November (it&rsquo;s a Christmas-related project) I discovered a critical issue. Like, fundamentally broken in its primary purpose.So it&rsquo;s another year for that. I don&rsquo;t think it&rsquo;s a hardware problem, but I&rsquo;m not sure. So here&rsquo;s to Christmas 2024.

mcyger · Answer

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.

bell-cot · Answer

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

revskill · Answer

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

theGeatZhopa · Answer

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

codegeek · Answer

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.