This happened to me in 2010. I love hiking, and when you get to the top of a mountain one of the things you do is look at all the other mountains and figure out

This happened to me in 2010. I love hiking, and when you get to the top of a mountain one of the things you do is look at all the other mountains and figure out which ones they are. It’s called name-that-peak. Sometimes at scenic overlooks there’s a nice hand-drawn placard with all the peaks labeled, so I wanted to make an app to do that. When I started, there was kind of a website to do this already, but it was absolutely awful and I knew I could do way better. So I did. I spent 100-150 hours working out all the math and coding up the program to reproduce that placard from terrain data. I still have all my notes. It was kinda slow — one panorama took 4-6 minutes to draw — but it worked. And then I didn’t ship. Life got in the way, and it was always harder for me to do the second 50% than the first, even though in this case the first 50% was way harder. Three years later, one of my friends shared an app with me, just released. It did the same thing. The author did a good job describing how I felt then too, how the app was good but I hated it anyway. I never used it, probably because I ended up moving overseas anyway to a place without free high-res terrain data. That was my best chance to date to do something I’ve always dreamed about: make something cool that a lot of people love to use. Novel, good ideas like that don’t come along very often.