What are you building right now that's taking a while to make? Are you authoring it yourself? Why is it taking so long to write?
Talk about it or share a link with us.
I first had to invent Tree Notation (2017), which I got wrong on my first two tries (2012's Note and 2013's Space). Then I needed to invent Grammar (2017), and then I made the predecessor to Scroll called Dumbdown (2019). 2 years after that I shipped the first version of Scroll (2021).
Now we are on Scroll version 58 and it's blazing fast, very simple, extremely extendible, and scales very well. Already today over 20,000 people have visited sites powered by Scroll!
It was 90% me for a while, but recently been very much a team effort.
It took a while to get right because it's a whole new kind of language—lots of mini languages that combine seamlessly— so there were a lot of mistakes that I made and had to undo, and it took a while to figure out exactly what was special about it and how to double down on that.
It involves adding highlights to websites and computer files, dragging the highlights to the outliner part or the program, adding comments and summaries to each highlight (making it a Note), organizing these Notes within an outline for the paper, so then the user could write each section of the outline while referring to the appropriate notes and original sources.
That's 5 years and 13,000 lines at about 11 lines a work day. That doesn't seem like much, but historically programmer productivity has been about 10 lines a day. Some people do dispute 10 lines a day, but it fits my experience.
Big projects take lots of time.
Companies wouldn’t trust half baked products in their toolset.
Except if
(a) it's some half baked unmaintened FOSS library that some guy created and quickly got bored with and abandoned, or
(b) it's a half baked expensive enterprise crap that comes with huge fees and an army of consultants and upsells