Getting Sidetracked by Jason Pridie
Okay, let’s talk about Jason Pridie. Not the guy himself, really, but what looking him up again made me remember. It’s funny how a name from years back can just pop up and send you down a rabbit hole.
I remember following guys like him, you know, the journeymen players, the ones bouncing around. Always thought there was more grit there sometimes. Back then, I got this idea in my head. I wanted to build a simple little thing, like a web tool, just for myself. Nothing fancy. The goal was to track players who weren’t the big stars, guys who got called up, sent down, traded.
So, I started tinkering. This was a while back. I grabbed some basic web stuff, thought it’d be easy. Boy, was I wrong.
- First, getting the data was a pain. Free sources were messy, inconsistent. Paid ones? Too much for a hobby project.
- Then, trying to make it update automatically? Forget about it. I wrestled with some scripting languages, trying to scrape info. It broke every other week.
- The whole thing just became this monster I dreaded looking at.
It wasn’t even about Jason Pridie anymore, or any player. It became about fighting the tools. I was spending hours debugging simple stuff, getting frustrated. Reminded me a bit of my old job, actually. We had this project, supposed to be straightforward. But the tech stack was all over the place. We had bits in Java, some Python scripts glued together, a database nobody fully understood. Just trying to add a simple feature took weeks of meetings and finger-pointing.
It burned me out, honestly. Staring at code that barely worked, arguing about why system A couldn’t talk to system B. It felt just like that little player tracker project – more effort than it was worth.
Around that time, things changed anyway. My kid started school, needed more help with homework. My wife got a promotion, busier schedule. Suddenly, spending nights fighting with broken code for a baseball tracker seemed… well, stupid.
So, I just stopped. Dropped the project. Unsubscribed from the data feeds I was trying to use. Moved on. Seeing Pridie’s name just brought all that back – the initial excitement, the grind, the frustration, and then just letting it go because life happens.
Haven’t really tried building a personal project like that since. Maybe it’s better that way. Spend more time coaching my kid’s soccer team now. Less debugging, more fresh air. Probably a better use of my time, thinking back on it.