Learning Through Public Failures

Or: "How I almost had a nervous breakdown building out a stupid goddamn web application not two steps beyond a standard CRUD App"

Writing this post was like pulling teeth. But it must be done.

One of the things about "learning publicly" is that you learn from your failures. This means I get to write about the good-intentioned idea that didn't work out the way I planned it to. Behold: the PasteBin project.

The Initial Excitement: A New Project Begins

I knew I had to start building web apps again if I wanted to get back into web development. I also knew I had been gone from the scene for about three years. The tech world doesn't stand still, and I was eager to catch up with all the new tools and frameworks I'd been hearing about.

My goal was simple: take Pastebin—a website where you can quickly share snippets of text or code with others by pasting them into a form and getting a unique link to share—and make a clone website to learn new technologies and programming concepts.

I had a clear list of features in mind…