Developer built a Svelte 3.0 + Netlify serverless Latvian noun-conjugation quiz, then abandoned it the day it deployed after realizing building the regex logic had passively taught him the grammar.
Key Takeaways
Hustle culture and tech interviews that score candidates on side-project output create real anxiety for beginners around projects that stall or die.
Latvian has 7 grammatical cases, 2 genders, 3 conjugation patterns per gender – roughly 84 noun endings – which motivated the quiz MVP with a 3-mistake limit and local-storage high scores.
Encoding the conjugation rules into regex to check answers transferred the knowledge out of the app and into the author’s head, making the deliverable redundant.
Abandoned projects can be reread as a skills log: one old repo showed a first Go API, another had Postgres GIS work, a broken animation later became a production site.
Reframing side-projects as throwaway prototypes removes the pressure to ship and makes them more useful as low-stakes experimentation and learning environments.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters accept the reframe intellectually but note the emotional sting of abandonment is real and not fully dissolved by retrospective analysis.
A clear split emerged between two stances: projects as creative outlets with no obligation to ship versus projects as implicit market tests – commenters favoring the former drew the line sharply at “market viability” motivation as the point where a side-project loses its purpose.
One commenter extended the time horizon argument: abandoned projects can sit for decades and get finished with more skill later, which reframes abandonment as deferral rather than failure.
Notable Comments
@siwakotisaurav: uses throwaway projects to build reference stacks for AI codegen tools – pointing Claude at prior architecture to skip rethinking scalability each time – and notes abandoned domains can retain SEO value.
