What would you consider your biggest waste of time project?

[app103]

This is not about code that you may have written for SomeCompany Inc.

And it's not about code for a project that you eventually released to the public.

This is about code that you slaved away with night after night, till the wee hours of the morning, losing many hours of sleep. Code that was of no interest to anyone in the world but you, at that time. Something you became totally obsessed over for reasons that may (or may not) be only known to you.

We have all had projects that have made others ask the question "why?", but have you ever spent too long on something that made you ask yourself "why?" at the end?

So what "probably-shouldn't-exist" code have you wasted way too much time on? 

[cranioscopical]

I have a program that makes me appear here as cranioscopical and make ill-advised comments.

The code itself was trivial, but it took many, many years to be this idiotic.

[app103]

I had this friend that was staying at my house for awhile. She had an odd hobby: she stole magnets off cars in the middle of the night. (actually, she had a lot of odd hobbies)

She had a huge box full of them at my place and many more boxes of them at her mom's house.

I started writing an application for her to keep track of what she had in her collection. (she had no idea I was doing this)

If I had finished it, it would have been a lot of work for an application usable by only a single person (her), and I wasn't even sure she would want, like, or use it. But I kept working on it any way...like a crazy woman.

I was out of my mind.

I used VB 6. 

I had no internet for about a week. 

I was in a lot of pain with a leg injury and couldn't walk. 

I was giggling the whole time like I had snapped. 

Lucky for me I got my internet back and snapped out of it and stopped working on that project before it went too far. It was also the last time I ever did anything in VB 6.



^{me - internet = insanity}

[Lashiec]

I wonder if app's friend will be...

The closest thing to this is me trying to optimize and solve every simple bug (most of them related to look 'n' feel) in my old programs for the university. One of the first I did (Pascal) was this one who had like 20 functions in there, and three of four have two nested functions as well, but not your usual function with two or three lines, no, actually it was like a whole other program in there. So one weekend I was browsing through all code and I found this sucker, and I said to me: "cleanup time". The whole weekend was spent there, rewriting almost everything, and fixing every single annoyance to work like it should. The program did exactly the same as before, but the code was understandable and it was quite easy to modify it after this, no need to read the whole source to find out what the hell it was doing.

So there you have, code that was of importance to me, but the rest of the world won't care much about it.

[TPReal]

Most of my programs are totally useless I write them just because an idea comes to my mind, and no one ever knows about them. For instance:
- A program to change images into text, somewhat similar to mouser's Unicode Image Maker
- A program that makes you mouse pointer behave as if it was attached on a spring
- A dirty helper for on-line game The Crims
- A program to encode and decode messages using an Enigma-like algorithm
- A program to browse all windows you have open (including those invisible, and windows' children like panels, buttons, ...)
- A Brainfuck! compiler
And many other, many of them unfinished, and all of them abandoned. But I try not to refer to them as a waste of time, but rather as my programming playground
The problem is that I'm 22 now and I still make more and more of them...

[mouser]

If i can keep to 50% the projects that fall into this category then i'm having a good year. 

I find that projects are like infections -- the best defense is to kill the idea as soon as i get it.. If i linger too much on it I will feel compelled to devote substantial time to implementing it until i can let go of it.

[TPReal]

On the other hand, some of those "hey it would be fun to have a program that does X" turned out useful, like HTTPJupiter, TPCube and TPXonix that I posted as a C++Builder Contest entries, and the work paid off. And now HTTPJupiter is probably most useful of my programs for me.
And I don't like killing ideas, they return in my nightmares

[Lashiec]

- A Brainfuck! compiler

OH, my! Now you were really amused to do that

[SkyIDE]

Well I recently started a different project which I announced over here, a toolbar/launcher like program until I got stuck into a section that I simlpy don't have a clue how it works. Why does MS make things so complicated for something as retrieving a bitmap of an icon! I gave up as I started spending way too much time on it...

It should be VERY simple, just return an IMAGE object or similar which I can simply assign to something but noooo, I have to go through some code rituals which I don't understand "why?"

[f0dder]

It should be VERY simple, just return an IMAGE object or similar which I can simply assign to something but noooo, I have to go through some code rituals which I don't understand "why?"

To understand some parts of the win32 API, you have to remember it was based on the win16 API... back then memory was scarce, and we didn't have x86 paging to help us manage memory, thus you had to "lock" and "unlock" memory, and "unlocked" objects could thus be moved around in memory... some of that also applies to all the imaging stuff, having to select things into contexts et cetera.

Yes, it could all be done simpler today, but we're stuck with legacy. And it's not that bad once you get the hang of it