I hope I didn't come off as overly aggressive, the comment was mostly for myself, I was feeling badly that there was no way I would be able to do implement something like this in 12 hours.
Often veterans here will talk about projects they trivially did. but unless you dig into their profile and find out who they are it feels like every joe-shmo on hn is a 1/2mil+ SWE at google.
No no, that didn't sound aggressive at all! Though I still wouldn't say the project was trivial, just very limited in scope. And had I done everything perfectly -- meaning, being able to stream code from my head with no errors -- the project may only have taken 3 hours. That's how small it is. I think the finished product is 800 lines of code, server and client together. It's conceptually very small too. (Maybe this is a 'veteran' skill as well, being able to keep things small.)
My point is that a whole 75% of the time I spent on this project was just me flailing around with stuff that wasn't working as I expected (that's relatable at all experience levels!). Perhaps it's true that veterans can get through certain things more quickly than novices can, but we're not immune to the 80/20 rule either! We just get stuck on different types of problems.
Often veterans here will talk about projects they trivially did. but unless you dig into their profile and find out who they are it feels like every joe-shmo on hn is a 1/2mil+ SWE at google.