Why Developers Build Unfinished Calculators

Every developer knows the rush. You are driving and suddenly you’re struck by a “life-altering” idea (your 14th this week). At the next red light, you record an audio while driving, avoiding eye contact with what clearly looks like a cop’s car. At 2 AM, you wake abruptly remembering the recording. Now you’re setting up repositories, debating frameworks, and buying AWS servers in the middle of the night. The blind spot? You’re convinced this time, you’ll finish.

Spoiler: You won’t. But that’s okay.

Programmers don’t use calculators. They build them, abandon them three-quarters finished, and then accidentally invent the next big thing while trying to fix a typo in the README.

That initial blind spot isn’t a flaw. It’s rocket fuel. It lets you ignore the boring bits (user auth, error handling, documentation) and dive headfirst into the fun: prototyping wild features, inventing a “revolutionary” ORM named LazyLlama, or crafting custom HTML tags that’ll “change frontend development forever.” Sure, your enthusiasm fades faster than a free-tier server under load, but along the way, you’ve accidentally learned how to optimize database queries (to make LazyLlama slightly less slow) or why shadow DOM exists (after your custom <sparkle-button> tag broke the browser's rendering engine).

As the blind spot clears, reality hits: your app needs more than CRUD and caffeine to survive. Suddenly, you’re procrastinating by rewriting config files or alphabetizing your npm dependencies. This resistance isn’t failure. It’s a teacher. Every abandoned project is a masterclass in scope creep (“Wait, should the calculator also solve quantum physics?”), tooling (“I spent 3 days building a CI/CD pipeline… for a todo app”), and prioritization (“The login page can wait—let’s add animated emojis first”).

Kids don’t climb monkey bars to “build upper body strength.” They do it because it’s fun. Likewise, developers don’t build half-finished tools to pad their résumés. We do it because playing with code is joyful. And just like kids, we walk away stronger. That abandoned Twitter-for-Cats app taught you websockets. The “ultra-efficient” ORM? Now you understand query optimization. The calculator left at 75%? You’ve mastered state management… and humility.

Your GitHub is a museum of “almosts,” and that’s beautiful. Every skeleton in your code closet taught you something. Instagram started as a check-in app. Slack was a gaming company’s side hustle. Your Blockchain-Based Pet Rock project? It taught you smart contracts and that not every idea needs to see daylight.

The next time guilt whispers, “You never finish anything,” laugh in its face. “You’ve got the wrong fellow,” you answer. You’re not failing, you’re iterating. The world needs developers who’ve climbed the mountain of “useless” projects, survived the valleys of tech debt, and lived to code another day. So go ahead: build that calculator. Abandon it at 75%. Then use what you learned to accidentally create something actually world-changing.

The only thing better than a finished project? A dozen unfinished ones that turned you into a coding wizard.

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