The Graveyard of Dead Projects

The Idea

A native Windows app that allows users to set a series of wallpapers with a timeframe for each. The app would automatically change wallpapers throughout the day based on the specified schedule.

Causa Mortis

I liked the idea of using Tauri, as it would allow me to manage wallpaper changes using Rust. However, the main issue was that the Windows API for changing wallpapers was quite limited. It didn’t support specifying settings for multiple monitors or choosing between fill and fit options.

Will I Ever Come Back to the Project?

I already did. It came back as Atmosphere, same idea in Tauri, except this time the schedule reacts to the weather and the monitor handling was worth the trouble.

The Idea

At the time, I was creating a lot of projects and manually uploading them to my Linode instance. I wanted to streamline this process by developing an app that would automate the necessary commands, manage environment variables, and essentially deploy projects for me.

Causa Mortis

I liked the idea, but as I worked on it, I realized that the effort required would exceed the benefits of automating the deploy process. The amount of work involvedJust all the posibilities for deploying without docker each language I wanted to test out makes the scope of this pretty ridiculous was not justified by the value it would provide.

Will I Ever Come Back to the Project?

No, considering that I no longer deploy to Linode and have moved to more streamlined options like Vercel, AWS, or Docker, I see no purpose in revisiting this project.

The Idea

I wanted to create a page where users could post messages to the void, visible only to others who had the app open at the same time. I envisioned it as something similar to The Unsent Project.

Causa Mortis

I prototyped it in about a day but felt it wasn’t enough, so I decided to scrap it.

Will I Ever Come Back to the Project?

I'd like to revisit it and keep it as a novelty. When I get around to learning Elixir more in-depth, I’d like to pursue it. For now, I plan to start by learning Elixir before diving into Phoenix Live View and AI assistance.

The Idea

A companion app for books similar to what Genius is for lyrics. It wouldn't be line by line but rather feature user-created summaries and charts for given books or chapters to help others remember what happened or serve as a companion while reading. I liked the idea of using something like TL Draw that would allow users to easily create charts for the current situation in a given part of a book.

Causa Mortis

TL Draw's versioning isn’t very developer-friendly as it isn’t based on SemVer For whatever reasonI got the basics of the app working on one PC, but when I cloned the repo on another, breaking changes appeared after running

npm i

I understand the need to adapt processes and tools to project needs, but considering that the npm ecosystem is based on SemVer I mean Semver is part of the npm docsI don’t think changing something like this makes much sense.

Will I Ever Come Back to the Project?

I still like the idea. I might come back to this if I find myself in an idea drought and if the TL Draw API stabilizes a bit so it's more manageable.

The Idea

A customizable game of Consequences playable across different computers, similar to Gartic Phone. At the end, an AI would generate images based on what was written.

Causa Mortis

I had already created all the logic, and it was working okay. It just needed some extra design and game configuration options. However, I realized that free AI image generation wasn't quite there yet. This meant that each game would have a considerable cost and wouldn't look amazing.

Will I Ever Come Back to the Project?

I did, without the images. After playing an online game of STOP with friends I remembered this one, dropped the AI part, and rewrote it in Elixir over a weekend. It lives at Consequences.

The Idea

The idea was to create a revamped UI version of Goodreads, keeping the functionality of rating books, writing reviews, sorting them into lists, and having a feed of what other users rate or add to their lists.

Causa Mortis

The project was initially planned with a couple of friendsat least a good lesson on why working on team projects is never easy to add a bigger project to all of our portfolios, but motivation faded from all parties. This led to the project being slowly dropped over the course of a few weeks.

Will I Ever Come Back to the Project?

I'd say there's no chance. I like the idea, but if I were to do an app of this style, I'd rather it be about something other than books. I don't enjoy simply recreating existing apps. Additionally, both of my friends who wanted to work on this no longer wish to continue, and I have no particular need to add a project like this to my portfolio.

The Idea

A web app that allows users to visualize their goals as a graph with a linear ordering of tasks, them being able to see what they currently can do, and what the steps are to get to the next step. The idea also included them settings the end goal and using an LLM or similar to generate the steps to get to the end goal.

Causa Mortis

I actually completed this project, I just will never release it. I think the idea is okay, but at the end of the day it's a glorified todo list, which I feels is not good enough to release so I'm just going to let it rot.

Will I Ever Come Back to the Project?

Unless I can figure out how to make it more interesting then I'm not going to.

The Idea

Some people write things for humans in robots.txt, like ASCII art, jokes, or job ads aimed at whoever was nosy enough to open the file. I wanted to crawl for those and collect them somewhere.

Causa Mortis

I wasn't convinced there was enough of it out there, so I crawled the top thousand domains before building anything. Around 4%It was 24% until I noticed my script was counting rows of equals signs as ASCII art of them had something a person had written in, which was more than I expected, but it turned out not to matter. A gallery of things I found is something you look at once and close, so it would have been a page rather than a project.

Will I Ever Come Back to the Project?

Not as a gallery. Those files change every time a site decides how it feels about GPTBot, and the Wayback Machine has been recording that for twenty years, so there might be something in watching them argue with the crawlers.