At its core that mostly what it is. The project forced me to get out of my comfort zone as a programmer. I picked up 2 new language/frameoworks (rails and angular), had to learn about building infrastructure on top of aws, deep dived into elasticsearch and then pollish everything enough to get it to a "showoff-able"(word?) state.
I think the reactions you're getting are likely focusing on this project as a useful product or a business, not a coding exercise.
Because it's well-trod territory, with existing products that have been around for years, you're probably seeing more negativity than you would have if we all knew this was a learning project.
That said, not every step of every coder's learning process is broadly interesting to a community of people who have been programming for decades in some cases.
Usually these kinds of posts are better received when they come as a blog post about what the person's background is, what they were trying to learn, and how they felt about using those tools for the first time.
