---
title: "Ten years of ideas I didn’t ship"
url: "https://bosnadev.com/2026/09/01/ten-years-of-ideas-i-didnt-ship"
author: "Mirza Pašić"
date: "2026-09-01"
topic: "Build log"
tags: ["building-in-public", "writing", "habits"]
summary: "A drawer full of ideas, some half-built and some shipped by other people. The rules I set myself for shipping, and the public scoreboard that counts."
---

# Ten years of ideas I didn’t ship

![A laptop, an open notebook with yellow sticky notes and a red desk lamp on a wooden desk by a sunlit window](https://media.bosnadev.com/writing/2026/09/01/ten-years-of-ideas-i-didnt-ship/laptop-on-the-desk-2400.webp)

I have a drawer full of ideas. Some made it into half-finished prototypes. Some lived in notes until I forgot what excited me about them. Others never escaped my head.

Then someone else built them.

I’d see the launch, recognize the idea, and feel that unpleasant mix of validation and regret. I had been right about the opportunity and done nothing with it. This went on for ten years.

During that time, life got bigger. I had three kids. Work demanded more of me. The spare hours I imagined using for side projects became increasingly theoretical. Even the server holding some of my old experiments eventually died. That felt about right.

## This is not a comeback post

I’ve been reading the proper advice since 2014. Ship before you’re ready. Start small. Make many things. Ignore the critics. Ideas are worthless unless you act on them. I agreed with all of it, and it changed nothing.

The problem with posts like this one is that writing about your intentions in public can feel enough like progress that your brain collects the reward before you’ve done the work. Gabriele Oettingen’s research on positive fantasies points in the same uncomfortable direction: imagining the future you want can drain the energy needed to reach it.

So this is not an announcement that I’m back. Announcements are the fantasy. What changes today is the mechanism.

## Rewiring my brain

Here is the contract:

  * If an idea stays in my mind for a week, I will build the simplest possible version and release it.
  * If I catch myself polishing something instead of publishing it, I will ship what exists that day.
  * If something fails, the failure becomes the next entry.
  * If the comments get unpleasant, they will stay in the comments section.
  * If a month passes without an entry, the gap will remain visible on the homepage.

That last rule is the one I would most like to do without, which is exactly why it stays. One entry a month, minimum. It doesn’t need to be a product or a well-written essay. It only needs to be published.

## The scoreboard

The grid on the homepage is generated from the entries themselves: nothing typed by hand, no streaks to fake, no way of making the story appear better than it really is. This post is the first new square in ten years. If I keep publishing, the grid will show it. If I go silent again, it will show that before I do.

Tim Urban talks about the Panic Monster, the creature that appears when a deadline gets near enough to become scary. Side projects don’t have one. There is no client waiting, no manager asking for a progress update, and no real repercussions if things slip by a week. That is precisely why I am creating one. The scoreboard is meant to make vanishing harder to justify.

## Why now might work when 2016 didn’t

I have less free time now than I did ten years ago, and it may be for that reason that this works. With three children I can’t disappear for months to work on a perfectly conceived idea, and I can’t treat every experiment like the beginning of a company. The available unit of work has become much smaller. Small, manageable projects are the only kind that fit.

The same restriction holds for the rest of my life. I intend to operate within the limits that already exist, without always hunting for more working hours. Something small enough to finish, real enough to release, and frequent enough to form an identity.

And that’s it.