Garden Gnome

In July 2024, I was on a pretty long break between personal software projects. My biggest hurdle was typically not my technical abilities or my motivation, but simply not having good ideas for things to implement. I'm not one to want to work on things that have already been created and are available online, and I've found that trying to do so only led to frustration and a lack of commitment. So I was enthusiastic about my newest idea for a website, which I believed to be a novel one. The idea was simple: create a database of people who own houses with lawns who wish they had a garden instead, and connect them with people who would be interested in planting but don't have their own land. My inspiration came entirely from my own experience living in an apartment in Austin at the time. I had nowhere to grow vegetables, and many of my neighbors were single family homes with lawns that had clearly been neglected. I would have loved to have gotten permission to transform someone's front yard into a veggie garden, and I figured the homeowner might appreciate it too. And if I was in a position to want this arrangement, I assumed that others might also be.

Over the course of about a week and a half, I learned the Go programming language and made a prototype of the website, with the UI copied from Falling Fruit. I relearned how to work with SQL databases (which I had not touched since high school when making a website for a business I started with a friend), and wrote Javascript code to display the locations of lawns in a map of the world.

I was proud of the work I'd done, and I estimated that I had probably another two or three weeks of work left to clean up bugs, make the code clean enough to open source it and not have someone immediately find vulnerabliities in it, etc. But then I found that my idea was not new after all. There already existed a website called Shared Earth which does the same thing! I no longer had a desire to work on this. If this were a business idea and I found out I had competition, I might have kept going in order to outcompete them. But for a website that solely exists for the public good, there was no reason to split up the user base and compete with an established site with a lot more credibility than mine.

You can see my code for this project on GitHub.