Building a new iOS app to cure my shiny object syndrome

Once I get to 60-70% completion of the personal project I have in hand I get tired and start looking for other things to do with my time. This has prevented me from finishing most of the things that I wanted to do. As soon as I understand the underlying moving pieces of what I’m doing I’m done with it.

Now that I come to think about it is not even a shiny object syndrome. I don’t start new things because I like those new things better. I start them because I get bored of what I’m currently doing.

Anyway, regardless of the name of what I have I believe it is undermining my potential to achieve what I want from life. For this reason I need to do things differently now, and for that I need to break the habit of not finishing my projects. I want to prove to myself that I can finish something so I’m starting a new iOS app and I plan to release it within 7 days of work (might not be consecutive though but that’s okay).

I’m currently on day 5 and very happy with the progress so far. The app is called Summa, a powerful calculator in which users can use natural language to interact with it. I think it has zero potential in today’s world where AI can give you a response for anything. I’ve also done some market research and I could only find 2 similar apps so the market might not be huge.

But that’s missing the point: I just want a fun project that I finish it.

And also, maybe this is my way of fighting the AI revolution we live in¹. It’s kind of poetic that now is all about probabilistic models and I decide to build a deterministic calculator that can be used with natural language.

Not against AI in general, but having been laid off because of it (or so they said) pisses me off to some extent. ↩

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