On Mothlamp Problems, Abandoned Projects, and Why We Should Start Calling Graveyards "Sketchbooks"

A mothlamp problem, defined by myself yesterday out of boredom, is a particular kind of engineering problem that has three important qualities:

• A certain type of nerd finds it beautiful and alluring to work on
• A solution requires solving the hardest known problems in the universe, often requiring years (if not decades) of effort
• Other people question the utility of solving the problem at all

Jacqueline coined this term in this post, and I thought it was great and incredibly relatable. I mean, who doesn’t have a collection full of half-finished projects?

It got me thinking: why don’t we (as engineers) talk about this stuff more? Other creative domains seem to have made peace with abandonment in public. When it came out that Kendrick Lamar had 6 albums of unreleased music, it’s not like people started seeing him as someone who can’t finish a project. Hell, one of Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous quotes is “Art is never finished, only abandoned”. This is because people in these domains accept that abandonment is a part of the creative process. Yet, either because of a stigma around not considering engineering as a true creative pursuit or something else, there seems to be some shame attached to not finishing a project in engineering.

I have plenty of abandoned mothlamp problems, but one comes to mind over the rest. Last year, I started a project to identify the samples used in songs. The idea was to have something like Shazam but for samples. I won’t go into details about the implementation, but it failed. Miserably. Time and time again, I would change something about the architecture of the neural network or how I prepared the training data, and time and time again, it just wouldn’t work. There eventually came a moment where I saw the bad results, closed my laptop lid and told myself I’d figure it out in the morning, and… I just never went back to it.

I’d be lying if I said that my mothlamp problem wasn’t still in my head; if it was, I wouldn’t be writing this post about it! But I feel a fire in my belly for other things at the moment. In the meantime, I’ll keep flying toward other lights.

People use the word “graveyard” to describe the pile of abandoned projects that an engineer accumulates in their attempt to solve mothlamp problems. I don’t think I like that word; it denotes something negative, like these projects died and it’s our fault for not seeing them through. I’d like to change that; I’m going to start calling it my sketchbook.