I counted last week: 6 projects sitting on my GitHub, and not one of them is finished.

I started most of them after 10 pm in my room in Dhaka, full of energy, usually minutes after watching someone build the same thing in a 12-minute video.

Here lies each one: why it died, in one honest line, and the one real thing it taught me before it did.

The weather app that never saw rain

Why it died: I spent three evenings choosing colours for the layout and never finished reading the weather data.

The app could show you a beautiful empty box. Inside that box was supposed to be a temperature, pulled from a free weather service. Getting it meant reading the service's documentation and understanding the shape of what came back: labelled values with names like "temp" and "feels_like".

What it taught me: what an API actually is, in my hands instead of in a definition. A program asking another program a question, and getting a structured answer back.…