Its probably hard to see this right now but any code you wrote was not a waste of time. You learned something that will become invaluable two years down the li

Its probably hard to see this right now but any code you wrote was not a waste of time. You learned something that will become invaluable two years down the line in another role and probably will boost your salary more than the opportunity cost of washing dishes and thus repay itself every year. Everyone who tackles a project like this should keep this in mind. Its almost certainly not going to make you immediate money, but you'll learn a lot doing it, and that will repay itself down the line. I've done this twice to myself and it was hard at the time to watch them fail but I now make $500k+/yr at one of the FAANGs and a lot of that salary I attribute to trying build these things, end to end, myself. I just have a much broader context on the industry, on technical stacks, and on software development than if I hadn't. So, congrats. :)