As someone who also makes these kinds of things all the time (sometimes it works, most of the time it does not) — let me just thank you for the "fake productivi

As someone who also makes these kinds of things all the time (sometimes it works, most of the time it does not) — let me just thank you for the "fake productivity" angle you highlighted. I am right in the middle of one of those, pushing the launch further out, yet again, and reading your article made that crisp and clear (in my case: changing from SQlite back to MySQL, from JWT via Auth Header to JWT via Cookies, etc.). I also wanted to mention that clearly knowing the hypothesis to test for at the very beginning isn't all that easy, in my opinion. A lot of the time, you need to walk down the path, even walk it for a good long while, until you hit the right angle or context to truly see where the project could land. You (hopefully) start these things with a "good enough" reason, but it often needs a lot of shaping and refining to get it all back into the light, for a wider audience. Curiosity in learning new things will (should) always be a good part of what fuels the effort, it's a safety net (for me as a developer anyway), shielding me a bit from ending up with purely wasted time once it's clear that it didn't lead anywhere. At least I learned something new along the way.