Jerod Santo and Adam Stacoviak recorded a Changelog Friends episode cataloguing dead and dying software projects. The discussion covers Sass, Meteor, RethinkDB, FaunaDB, Quicksilver, and others, using them as concrete case studies for how projects actually die: tech debt accumulation, bad timing, market shifts, and optimizing for the wrong metrics.
The value here is not the obituaries. It is the diagnostic framework Santo and Stacoviak build around why these specific projects failed when they did. RethinkDB and FaunaDB alone offer a pointed lesson in how database projects can lose the market window even with strong technical foundations.
Changelog++ members get a 6-minute shorter cut with no ads. The full episode is the one to read if you are building anything that could plausibly appear on this list in five years.
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