Hacking on a Project: Getting Out of the Tutorial Loop

Tiffany White,

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

Footnotes

  1. My first real pull request was closed because someone else took it up. I also went out of the scope of the issue. 2

  2. Couldn’t find the episode I was on. The show is on permanent hiatus. 2

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