The Junkyard

A scrapbook of failed experiments, abandoned prototypes, and strange ideas.

SME FundOct 2019 - March 2020

Rakiya SME Fund

RSF started on the campus of ALU with the aim of providing capital for student entrepreneurs to start and grow their ventures. During its lifetime, RSF provided debt financing for 2 student businesses alongside business development support in form of product development and marketing supporting.

Why it failed: The university campus shutdown at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in students going home and the project ending.

Lesson

Cut the fluff and Invest in what you know. Expand your knowledge constantly

Failed experimentMar 2020

Auto-Garden Scheduler

An app that would assign weekly gardening shifts using calendar APIs.

Why it failed: Plants do not respect Google Calendar. Neither do humans.

Lesson

Some systems work because they are loose, not in spite of it.

Strange ideaFeb 2022

Seed Coin

A token backed by literal seeds in a literal vault — a half-joke that almost shipped.

Why it failed: Logistics. And a very kind lawyer.

Lesson

Some ideas exist to be told at dinner, not deployed at scale.

Abandoned prototypeJul 2019

Network for Systems Thinkers

A small social network where every post had to be a Venn diagram.

Why it failed: Turns out we like sentences too.

Lesson

Constraint as design is good. Constraint as personality is exhausting.

SketchAug 2020

Continental Logistics Dashboard

An ambitious mockup for a single dashboard tracking goods across six countries.

Why it failed: Ambition outran data partnerships by approximately five years.

Lesson

Mockups should be cheap so reality can disagree quickly.

Failed experimentJan 2023

Essay-A-Day Bot

A bot that would email me one prompt every morning, forever.

Why it failed: I unsubscribed on day nine.

Lesson

Discipline cannot be outsourced to a cron job.