9

It's over.

I've been working on you for months, and thinking about you for near a year.
I built you with a shitty language first and some crappy ideas. I obviously got bad results, but I didn't lose courage and I continued you.
Got near the obsession to improve you. Every time. Switched to a fast but hard language. Got into my first low-level fuss. All for you.

Now I reached the end with no more improvements and tweaks I could imagine, I can tell that:

I had a lot of expectations from you.

But turns out you were nothing more than a nasty brain fart pretending to be a good idea.

The core of the concept was rotten. Blinded by my lust for success (perhaps cupidity ?) I didn't see you just couldn't work.
I'm utterly disgusted, of course. Who wouldn't, after working so hard on something that looks right but is completely useless ?

But even though this was all in vain, you taught me some great lessons down the road.
Efficiency matters over facility.
Get sure you're using the right tools, and stay open for changes of such.

But some others were harsher, though just as important.
There's times you just have to admit defeat.
Putting a lot of efforts into something doesn't always bring a reward.
If after a long time you can't get the thing right, then stop. Your time is precious. Don't waste your time or time will waste you (Thanks Muse, I love this sentence).

And the most important: next time I got some "grand" idea that is not about improving some random software, I'll bang my head to my desk enough times to forget about it.

So now the time has come.

Goodbye, project "hpym". You put me in grief, but I know I matured a lot in my concepts of development because of you.
Now take place into the project graveyard among the other clunky half-assed shit I got rid off.

Comments
  • 0
    This project was a good Project. RIP ⚰️
  • 1
    What was the project about?
  • 0
    @matt-jd It was an attempt for a recursive compression algorithm
    Of course it has been designed not to be another DEFLATE clone. But that wasn't enough
  • 0
    @CodeTalker so what was wrong with it? I didn't really get what was faulty or was it just not efficient enough?
  • 0
    @CodeTalker so what was wrong with it? I didn't really get what was faulty or was it just not efficient enough?
  • 0
    @matt-jd Clearly wasn't efficient enough. It spent 12 minutes compressing a 100MB file to output a 97MB file with one pass.
    "Crap" I said first, "but well since it's designed to be recursive it might provide better results with more passes"
    The good joke is that 8 passes later the file size stayed roughly the same.

    I had one explication for this phenomenon: http://scholarpedia.org/article/...
    But the thing is that, in its design it was supposed to somewhat bypass this phenomenon, coming from reduced efficiency to fully random. But it never succeeded.
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