An honest post about perfectionism, unfinished projects, and why my portfolio is named after a vegetable

The worst advice I ever got about building projects

"You should know it all before you start."

You won't. You never do. And waiting until you do is just a more socially acceptable way of never starting.

I have a graveyard.

An Android SDK for image processing that never saw light. A logistics platform that got about 80% done before I move to different things. An e-commerce thing. Some indie apps I built sitting in a private repository.

I'm a full-time software engineer. I know how to build things. So why couldn't I finish any of them?

The answer, if I'm honest, is that I kept building the wrong version. Not wrong in the technical sense but rather wrong in the scope sense. Every project became the version that would handle every edge case and look perfect doing it. I never admitted that. But just kept building like that was the goal.

It wasn't perfectionism in the classic sense. It was perfectionism disguised as engineering. "I'll ship it when the architecture is right." Meanwhile nothing shipped.

Then my wife suggested I call it 감자랩 as in PotatoLab

I laughed. Then I thought about it.

Potatoes are not glamorous. They're lumpy, inconsistent, yet nobody ignores them. But if you know what you're doing with them, they turn into something completely different. Something good. The raw form doesn't matter; what matters is that you actually cook them.

So I made a rule for myself

A project that goes into the lab. It has to meet a small, specific set of requirements I define upfront not a roadmap, not a backlog, just: what does this need to do to be real? When it hits that bar, it ships. Not when it's perfect. Not when it scales. When it works well enough to be true.

Shipped doesn't mean finished. It means fulfilled. A small promise, kept.

The experiments on PotatoLab aren't impressive in scope. None of them are perfect. But they exist outside my laptop, which is more than I can say for the SDK that was going to change mobile image processing.

Start lumpy. Ship weird. Cook the potato.

In Part 2, I'll get into more details, and I don't know what I am going to write about but here we are...