For anyone who started a plugin and never shipped it - where did it actually die?

General JUCE discussion
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Been building my first proper plugin and I keep noticing how little of my time went into the DSP. The audio code was almost the easy part. Most of it vanished into UI, code signing, notarisation, CI, packaging, getting the thing to even load on someone else’s machine, sorting out licensing, and all the manual testing across multiple platforms/devices. Got me wondering whether that’s universal or just my particular flavour of pain.

So, honest question for anyone who’s started something and never got it out the door: where did it die? The idea - not knowing what was actually worth building? The DSP itself? The GUI? The build/sign/packaging side? Testing across hosts? Licensing and payments? Getting anyone to notice once it was done? Or just ran out of time and steam?

Not fishing for anything in particular - genuinely curious which stage is the real graveyard, because I suspect everyone assumes it’s whichever bit happened to bite them. War stories welcome.

1 Like
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In my experience I would say that’s pretty universal. I would say it often falls under the category of “the last 10% takes 90% of the time”.

I would normally advise that people start getting the code-signing, notarisation, installers, CI, automated testing, etc. going right at the start of the project, I don’t recommend leaving those to last. However, a UI can still take a much more considerable amount of time than the DSP (there are of course exceptions to the rule), and licensing can be a bit more complicated to implement at the beginning if it’s the first product you are working on.

4 Likes
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That is absolutely a very common thing.

That’s why you should never show a Product Manager your prototype. They will think it is “finished” and will begin advertising it as a finished product even though 90% of the work (all the “Productization” things you mentioned) aren’t done yet.

Agree with Anthony that your CI/CD should be set up and running before you write a single line of code.

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Even though this topic raised some debates lately.

I must say those are things that became much less annoying with LLM/agents.
Type-safety with C++ is great here so the basic testability is deterministic.

  • compile
  • treat warnings as errors (for some) if you’d like extra overview.

It won’t end your devops woes, but it’ll be beneficial

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Where did it die?

When I fell ill. For long project (one man during a decade) don’t forget that you are human.

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As somebody still fighting in the trenches, good health is important but having no sales is like having no ammunition.