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Baruch Hen
Baruch Hen

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What's your best failure?

We love talking about our successes, but failure can be also seen as a positive thing rather than just a negative thing.

We learn often from our failures and that's what helps us build ourselves. I know that without all of my mistakes, I wouldn't be where I am today.

So let's talk about our favorite failures & what we learned from it! It could be anything!

My Failure!

In my case, I'll talk about a passion project.
I learned how to program mainly to develop video games. My work from that time can be seen on http://isolatedpixel.com/

At the time I was really bad at estimating what it really takes to create a full-blown project, and I was a strictly solo developer. It was hard for me to delegate work down to other people, but I slowly learned from those experiences that I can trust others to deliver as well. I shouldn't rely only on myself. I also ignored a big important factor that would determine the project's success, Marketing. I thought at the time that if I simply make something, people would line up to buy it! (Spoiler alert, that doesn't really happen... 😅)

(of course, some people do that and get away with it! It's still a lot of work though. My favorite example of someone who did it is the creator of Stardew Valley @ConcernedApe )

Those projects on that site were really fun for me to work on, and I'm hoping to one day revive the site.

I am extremely proud of the following failures from that site:

  • grid/chunk system I designed for "Project Biosphere" which is a Terraria clone in a way.

  • Inventory/stat system I designed for "Project DG"

  • A game I actually published on the Android Play Store, which I later took down b/c I didn't have time to support and patch. The game was called "Tomchick's Adventures"

None of my projects really got traction or sold, therefore they can be seen as failures. However, I learned a lot from making them, and I know that my next project would be better!

I am looking forward to my next project, failure or success, as long as I'm learning from it & enjoying the journey!

This post is inspired by a recent #AMA by @joelgriffith
(You can see our full discussion here )

So now it's your turn, what are your best failures? we all got some!

Top comments (2)

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thayannevls profile image
Thayanne Luiza

I tried a project for 5 months with some friends and failed completely. But it's my best failure because I could learn everything that makes a project fail, such as bad planning, bad leadership and not working in small steps.

Now I have some successful projects thanks to the things I learned from my failure.

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lmolivera profile image
Lucas Olivera

My biggest failure was when I was 12 and had to make a project in Scratch about biology I think. The thing is I had worked on it for over a week and the day before the presentation I deleted the whole project. I had no backups!

Luckily I made more preparation than code so I made it over again in 6 hourse but I'll never forget feeling so dumb haha.