Rangos

A calculator to help freelancers price a project: hours, risk, how much they wanted the work, how badly they needed the money that month.

I spent three weekends on it. I never showed it to anybody. It’s the only project on this site that failed before it existed.

Why it never shipped

The reason I gave myself at the time was that it was not finished. That was true and it was not the reason.

The real one is that I was not sure the answer it produced was any good, and shipping it would have meant finding out. As long as it stayed on my machine it could still be the useful thing I imagined. Not launching is a very effective way of never being wrong.

What I actually learned

That the instinct to keep polishing is often not craft. Sometimes it’s avoidance wearing craft’s clothes, and I’ve got better at telling which one I’m doing — mostly by noticing that the parts I’m polishing are the parts that were never at risk.

It’s also where I started distinguishing between decisions you can undo in an afternoon and decisions you live with. Shipping a rough calculator was firmly the first kind. I’d been treating it like the second.

The file is still on a drive somewhere. I have not opened it.