I’ve built a lot of things that never shipped.
Side projects. Scripts. Little tools. Half-finished ideas that lived entirely on my laptop and quietly disappeared when I got distracted by something else.
If success is measured by launches, users, or money, then yeah — most of this was a waste of time.
Which is inconvenient, because I keep doing it anyway.
Somewhere along the way, everything stopped needing a reason
Early on, every project had to justify itself.
Learn this so it helps my career.
Build that so I can talk about it later.
Ship something so it looks like progress.
That works for a while. Then it just gets tiring.
These days, a lot of what I build exists because I’m curious, or annoyed, or trying to scratch an itch that only I seem to have. Sometimes I just want to see if an idea will fall apart, and usually it does. That’s fine.
No roadmap. No planning. Definitely no tickets. Just me, a terminal, and a questionable decision.
The stuff that actually taught me something never shipped
Most of the things I rely on professionally didn’t come from neat tutorials or carefully planned projects.
They came from breaking my own code, rewriting the same thing multiple times, and realizing an idea was bad only after I’d already sunk time into it. I’ve chased bugs that didn’t matter and performance issues no one would ever notice, and somehow those are the moments that stuck.
None of those projects went anywhere.
The lessons did.
They show up later, usually when something breaks in a real environment and my brain goes, “oh… I’ve made this mistake before.”
Shipping matters, just not always
Yes, real-world experience matters. Shipping things matters.
But not every project needs to turn into something useful, profitable, or impressive. Some things exist just to keep your brain sharp, remind you why you liked building things in the first place, or keep you from burning out entirely.
If every line of code has to justify its existence, eventually everything starts feeling like work.
Why I’m posting this here
This is also a stress outlet for me. Even if no one reads a single word, it helps me to write it out anyway.
If you’ve ever built something just to see if you could, you’re probably not alone.
If you want more of this (fair warning)
I write longer, messier thoughts like this on my personal blog.
No lessons promised. No guarantees. Just tech, side projects, and the occasional bad idea.
If that sounds appealing, it lives here:
https://michaelroberts.me/blog
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