I gave up for two months.
Not officially. I never said the word. I just closed the laptop on a Tuesday and didn't open it again until a Sunday, eight weeks later. That gap is the part of this story I want to write down, because every other version of it I've read skips straight from the failure to the comeback and pretends the silence in between didn't happen.
What Giving Up Actually Looks Like
There's no moment of decision. No closing statement. You just stop opening the file, and life fills in around it, and one day you notice it's been three weeks and you haven't thought about it.
I'd built the in . Within a few days I had a logo, a colour scheme, a map of NHS hospitals across the UK. My wife said it looked professional. I felt, briefly, like someone who builds things.
That was the problem. It looked like the end when it was nowhere near the beginning. I'd built the window display before I'd built the shop.
When I tried to wire up a — a , APIs to pull in and ratings, a way to serve real information to real users — I had no idea where to start. The and the existed in different worlds and I didn't speak either language well enough to connect them. So I closed the laptop and told myself this was a problem for another day.
That day didn't come.
The Silence
The eight weeks weren't dramatic. I didn't spiral. I didn't tell anyone I'd given up because I hadn't officially given up — I was just very busy, and the project was on pause, and I'd get back to it soon.
My wife stopped asking about it. I stopped bringing it up. That was the most honest signal — the thing you've quietly filed under maybe not.
The hard part wasn't the project failing. The hard part was the version of myself I'd quietly admitted into evidence. I'm a doctor. I'm trained to be competent. I don't enjoy being a beginner, and I especially don't enjoy being a beginner who tried and quit. The silence wasn't restful. It was a slow accumulation of a particular suspicion — that I had tried something and found my limit, and that the honest thing to do was admit it and move on.
The idea I could forget. MedRank, the problem it was solving, the vision of junior doctors using it during preferencing season — all of that faded fine. What I couldn't forget was a smaller, more uncomfortable question. Was I actually someone who builds things, or just someone who starts them.
It didn't feel like failure. It felt like silence.
The Return
I came back on a Sunday night. No announcement. No fresh plan. I just opened the laptop and started again.
I didn't feel ready. I hadn't watched tutorials or read documentation or done anything that would justify confidence. I just knew that not knowing was worse than trying again and failing again.
The difference this time was one decision: I wasn't going to touch the . Not yet. No interface, no colours, no map. I was going to build something invisible first — a that actually worked, data that actually lived somewhere, APIs that actually responded. Ugly, functional, provable. If I couldn't build that, there was no point building anything on top of it.
Nobody would see this version. There was nothing to show. That turned out to be a relief.
Building in the Right Order
first is not the advice you get when you're starting out. The advice you get is to build something you can show people, get feedback early, make it real. That advice assumes you already know what you're building. I didn't. Following it cost me two months.
I want to be honest about what "building the " actually looked like. I wasn't writing code. I wasn't reading documentation. I wasn't a junior developer heroically figuring things out. I was opening Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini and typing sentences like: explain this to me like I've never seen a line of code in my life. Tell me what we're doing and why before we do it.
That was the method. Ask, read, try to understand, ask again. Twenty minutes on a single concept — what a is and why you need one, what an actually does, why the and need to talk to each other at all. Some evenings I'd make one thing work and spend the rest of the time understanding why it worked. That felt slow. It was the only way I was going to build something that didn't collapse the moment I tried to extend it.
The first time everything connected and real data appeared exactly where I'd asked it to, I sat and looked at it for longer than I should have. Nothing to show anyone. But it worked.
A working ugly thing beats a broken beautiful one every time.
Different Table, Same Feeling
There's a moment when you scrub in — gloves on, gown tied, stepping up to the table — where something shifts. The noise drops away. Every thought you had walking into the hospital that morning becomes irrelevant. There is only the thing in front of you and what needs to happen next.
The problem is that moment ends. The case closes, the gown comes off, and you're back in the corridor writing discharge summaries. The ward round doesn't give you that feeling. The paperwork doesn't. The meetings certainly don't. After a while you notice a quiet restlessness — a need for something that has stakes, something where the outcome depends on what you do next.
I found it again, alone, at midnight, keyboard in front of me, locked in.
Different table. Same feeling.
Build the boring part first.
MedRank series