Things I built on summer break
Three months, two finished things, one abandoned thing, and some notes on what made the difference.
Summer break is the only time in the year where I have long, uninterrupted stretches to build things for no reason other than wanting to see if I can.
Here's what happened this summer.
The finished things
A personal dashboard. I wanted one place to see my calendar, a daily focus item, and the current weather without opening five different apps. Built it in a weekend with Next.js and a few APIs. I still use it most mornings. It's not impressive — it's basically a webpage with some data on it — but that's fine because I made it exactly the way I wanted it.
A script that formats my notes the way I like. I keep notes in plain text files. I have opinions about how they should look when I print them or share them. The script handles that automatically. Took maybe four hours. Saved me a tedious manual step I'd been doing for over a year.
The abandoned thing
I started building a habit tracker. Not because I needed one — there are hundreds of habit trackers — but because I thought it would be interesting to design one from scratch around my own model of how habits work.
I got about two weeks in and lost interest. The design problems I thought would be interesting turned out not to be, and I didn't have enough conviction about the product to push through that.
I don't feel bad about this. Not everything needs to finish. The two weeks taught me something about what I actually find interesting to design, which is useful information.
What made the difference
The things I finished had a clear, personally useful outcome. The thing I abandoned had an interesting-sounding problem but no moment where I'd say "this is done and I use it."
That's the pattern I keep seeing: I build things all the way to the end when there's a specific moment I'm building toward. Vague ambition doesn't sustain the last 20% of the work. "I want to use this thing" does.