Shutting down a personal project

Today I announced the shutdown of a project I built a few months ago. It was a URL shortener and a relatively simple implementation of it. It was something I created in about a night when I first did it. It was crude and didn’t have a lot of features, but that was okay. It was my first time fuelled by energy drinks, and it was quite an experience. I loved it.

I soon released it to the General Body of our college, and it was a project exclusively for them. What’s the point of a URL shortener, you might ask? What was different about mine from any of the other 100s on the market? It was the branding which was special to me. It was not a generic domain. It was like a college-specific URL shortener, closely associated and self-branded.

But disappointingly, it didn’t work out. The adoption and subsequent usage rate were well below my expectations. But it’s okay. Everything comes to an end eventually. I didn’t expect that it’d be hard to write the post that announced that it was going away. I never felt too attached to it until now. It feels like something close to me is going away, but that’s alright. It was going to happen, sooner or later.

It has been a fun ride, and I’ve loved it.
But it’s time to move on.

P.S. I plan to do an open-source project with the features I wish I had added to this project. Super excited for this one too.