There are plenty of people in our industry (software development) who advise to fail early and fail often. This is a story of such a project.

The OSTD is a really cool idea: get free translations, or at least get started on them. I never pushed it too hard but I developed it to the point where the fundamental features worked. And I waited to see if anyone would use it. As far as I know almost noone did.

Eventually I translated two of my own relatively popular open source apps using the OSTD hoping that when people see there is a 10% complete translation in their language – that will encourage them to fix it up, making them a contributor to my project. That didn’t happen either. You can see the red lines for Asunder and ISO Master.

Like so many others I sometimes preach fail early and often, and I’m glad I practice it as well. Even knowing that failure is a required part of the process of developing great things – it’s still annoying. Especially when you don’t understand what the problem is. Oh well, writing this post was my way to vent.

The OSTD has failed, I am finally admitting it to myself and to everyone else :)