Hacking on a Project: Getting Out of the Tutorial Loop
For a long time now, I have been increasingly bothered by my lack of Open Source contributions on GitHub 1 and of real world projects to put on my portfolio and resume.
Everyday, practically, for the past two months, I have been irritated, by my lack of production. I have the skill to build projects but all I was doing, am doing, is learning, being stuck in the tutorial loop my buddy Alex Gwartney (opens in a new tab) and Nick Queen (opens in a new tab) talked about on Developer Soup (opens in a new tab) 2.
Forcing Ideas
Thinking about building projects, having ideas, for those projects, or coming up with ideas is the hardest part of the whole thing.
For weeks I have been researching a library to build to open source, but I really couldn’t think of much. An XML to JSON parser? Been done. Opening up a new terminal with Node on macOS? Meh.
I took to Code Newbie Slack to ask around. Someone gave a suggestion but he said he personally tries to not force things like that.
That made a lot of sense to me. The block I was in was because I was looking for things to code that I didn’t need or was just forcing the idea just to have an open source project to my name. That isn’t a great idea.
Good Programmers Scratch Their Own Itch
I was sitting down to write an article in Ulysses, which I always do, because of the markdown features. I am often frustrated my editing and finding grammatical errors and such because apps like Grammarly and Hemingway get upset when you paste in Markdown.
I came up with the idea of tapping into an API for checking the grammar of markdown documents.
It’s something I need. It’s something people have done in a way but at the command line and now in a broader scope. So I’ve found my project.
Coding the Thing
I am using Material Design Lite for the UI.
I’ve gathered a few snippets for elements that I’d like to use the most important one being for the modal polyfill for the <dialog> tag as most browsers don’t support it:
This is just one example of the way you could use the polyfill.
Diving In = Happiness
Spent a lot of time looking at documentation and pumping out a little bit of the HTML. Still trying to wrap my head around where to go and how so I am probably going to make a mindmap in MindNode and export it to TaskPaper or OmniFocus. But either way, I need to find some structure in this to actually know how to go forward.
Building things makes me extremely happy and want to get out of bed and work. I actually got out of bed in the morning instead of mid-afternoon because I knew there was interesting work waiting for me.
It’s a good time to be alive, that’s for sure. :-D
For a long time now, I have been increasingly bothered by my lack of Open Source contributions on GitHub 1 and of real world projects to put on my portfolio and resume.
Everyday, practically, for the past two months, I have been irritated, by my lack of production. I have the skill to build projects but all I was doing, am doing, is learning, being stuck in the tutorial loop my buddy Alex Gwartney (opens in a new tab) and Nick Queen (opens in a new tab) talked about on Developer Soup (opens in a new tab) 2.
Forcing Ideas
Thinking about building projects, having ideas, for those projects, or coming up with ideas is the hardest part of the whole thing.
For weeks I have been researching a library to build to open source, but I really couldn’t think of much. An XML to JSON parser? Been done. Opening up a new terminal with Node on macOS? Meh.
I took to Code Newbie Slack to ask around. Someone gave a suggestion but he said he personally tries to not force things like that.
That made a lot of sense to me. The block I was in was because I was looking for things to code that I didn’t need or was just forcing the idea just to have an open source project to my name. That isn’t a great idea.
Good Programmers Scratch Their Own Itch
I was sitting down to write an article in Ulysses, which I always do, because of the markdown features. I am often frustrated my editing and finding grammatical errors and such because apps like Grammarly and Hemingway get upset when you paste in Markdown.
I came up with the idea of tapping into an API for checking the grammar of markdown documents.
It’s something I need. It’s something people have done in a way but at the command line and now in a broader scope. So I’ve found my project.
Coding the Thing
I am using Material Design Lite for the UI.
I’ve gathered a few snippets for elements that I’d like to use the most important one being for the modal polyfill for the <dialog> tag as most browsers don’t support it:
This is just one example of the way you could use the polyfill.
Diving In = Happiness
Spent a lot of time looking at documentation and pumping out a little bit of the HTML. Still trying to wrap my head around where to go and how so I am probably going to make a mindmap in MindNode and export it to TaskPaper or OmniFocus. But either way, I need to find some structure in this to actually know how to go forward.
Building things makes me extremely happy and want to get out of bed and work. I actually got out of bed in the morning instead of mid-afternoon because I knew there was interesting work waiting for me.
It’s a good time to be alive, that’s for sure. :-D