For the past 5 months or so I’ve been working on Metome, a personal diary web app. Today, I decided to throw in the towel.

I started on the sketches for it after leaving a particularly crappy job. There were things I wanted to reflect on and express that I felt I had no real place for.

The design of the app was guided by the belief that a good diary is an unfiltered place of raw expressiveness. I was designing a no-pressure place for intimate, imperfect content to feel personal.

The pitch for Metome, is something I was particularly happy with:

Write for yourself and answer to no one.

A lot happened in those 5 months though. I got a new job, I made this blog, and I’ve been enjoying the paper Hobonichi Planner more than I thought I would.

But at the heart of it, working on the code just started to get depressing. It wasn’t an unmaintainable spaghetti mess or anything - it’s not so bad. And while the last straw was having yet another middleware component get deprecated without a well-documented alternative, it wasn’t that either, not really.

It just wasn’t fun anymore. I feel shitty for saying that, like I’m a quitter or something.

Rationally I know I shouldn’t feel guilty though. Nobody was depending on it yet, and I was passing on the things I wanted to do to spend time on the thing I didn’t.

I don’t think working on Metome was a sunk cost though. Diving head first into the world of servers, I learned Mongo, Socket.io, Node and a bunch of other things arguably ahead of the curve. I also gained an appreciation for the nuances of form design, software pricing, and single page apps.

This was my first large end-to-end project, and my first time with a lot of new things. Likely, future attempts will be smaller and less tumultuous, although I may end up trying something totally different next time.

Fork it on github