Unfortunately I've decided to discontinue work on this week's project. It looks like I didn't do enough research in the early stages (Monday morning) and decided to build a feature that already exists as part of YouTube. I totally botched the research portion and as such missed a major feature of the very service I was trying to build on to.

Fail early and fail often is the mantra I've heard before. It's not something I like to embrace. Ideally I like to scope something out adequately, work my butt off, meet the goals I or others have set for myself, and release it. It may not be a winner and may not make a million dollars. But at the very least I can look at it, and say, "I did that. That represents X amount of hours of me hacking away at a keyboard."

Part of the allure of 50projects was that I would hedge my bets. No one project would be my focus for a period of time. Instead I'd get to dance around and try out all of the neat technologies and hone my skills. Conversely the thing that scared that pants off of me was the idea of 50 opportunities to fail miserably (and publicly). The odds are that many of the projects are going to fail. This just happens to be the first. I can accept that some of my projects may not get used in a real world scenario. I can accept that I won't see $1 from many if not all of them. I just have difficulty swallowing the fact that some are going to end up being nothing more than a learning experience.

As far as learning experiences go. I messed around with Ruby on Rails and pulled some content out of YouTube's Data API. Nothing revolutionary but hopefully it will allow me to build up future projects a little bit faster.

Next week, I'll be starting early on the research to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen in the future (or at least not as often).