My First Side Project Was a Success—and Then I Blew It

The year was 2005, and I was in my second year of Computer Science. I really loved web development and wanted to learn a language that could help me create a web application.

Back then, tabletop RPG players were struggling to find a way to play their games with friends online, but no tool existed to meet their needs.

I was one of those players. During my teenage years, I loved playing Vampire: The Masquerade and shared the same problem as everyone else. We had grown older, gotten jobs, and could no longer spend our afternoons playing at someone else's house. So, I had the brilliant idea of creating a place where people could play online with their friends.

I bought a PHP book and started learning. Soon, I realized that just reading wouldn't be enough. Programming is a practical profession, and you need to practice! The best way to practice is to build something, so I decided to create a tool for all those "orphaned" RPG players.

The goal was simple, but I had no idea how to achieve it. Basically, I wanted to build a platform where game masters could form groups, accept players, and then play using a chat mechanism with dice rolling.

A note to remember: There was no YouTube or abundant development content on the internet. I had only a few forums, Orkut (remember that?), and my book for guidance.

Eventually, I made it happen. The PHP code was awful, and my frontend used tables for formatting and positioning content (with almost no CSS). But it worked.

I went to all RPG communities on Orkut and created a post announcing my RPG game tool. Everyone went crazy! I had 1,000 users in two weeks (which was a huge number in 2005) and 7,000 visitors during the whole month.

I was so excited! I could only think about my app and what new features I could introduce.

But then my knowledge limitations caught up with me. I had no idea what code versioning was. GitHub didn't even exist yet. My deployment method was simply pushing files through an FTP client like FileZilla.

So I wondered: How could I upgrade and add features while people were using the app? Then I had my most "brilliant" idea that would ultimately destroy my dream.
"I have to take the web app down while I write new features, and then when it's finished, I'll put it back up." Brilliant! If only it were that simple.

I sent an email to all users saying we would be offline for a week and return with many new features. That week went by quickly, and I couldn't even begin writing new features (I had a 9-to-5 regular job). The more time passed, the more desperate I became—but I kept believing I could do it. I left a landing page saying "we'll be back"... and years went by. I kept paying for the domain, kept believing... until 10 years had passed, and I never wrote a single line of those imagined features. Then it hit me: It's gone; you're never going to do it.

In 2015, I paid for the domain for the last time, and it was all gone.

After that, I tried to create many different side projects, but none of them made it to production.
Only this year, after almost 20 years, I found the courage to build again and finish a project. It doesn't matter if it doesn't get any attention or users.

Do not be afraid to fail. Do not be afraid of not being successful. Do not let yourself down if things don't work out as you expected. Just build. Eventually, you'll get it right—or not. But you'll learn a lot along the way.

If you want to know, these are the two side projects that I built this year: