I am not sure if you got the point of the linked story. The C++ appointment software is a trivial fun side project. The point is that she had to quit her terri

I am not sure if you got the point of the linked story. The C++ appointment software is a trivial fun side project. The point is that she had to quit her terrible job to even get into the right headspace to do anything useful on this trivial fun side project. Besides, have you never written anything for a side project that scratches a personal itch that hadn’t already been done dozens of times in better ways? I find her stories illuminating and well written. Sometimes we spend lots of time on things that we realize could have been done in much simpler ways. Sometimes we make mistakes that we later realize are super dumb. It happens to everyone who writes software for a living. I’m happy that Rachel writes about the messy stuff. We need more “from the trenches” stories like hers.