Skip to main content

#1 - The Beginning

April 23rd, 2017

Two weeks after quitting to pursue my own hobbies and the "dream" of running my own business or making my own product, I find myself looking back at work career with fondness. So many things have happened over the past few years, people I've met and things I've done, that it's hard to make sense of it all. But in the end, it doesn't really matter. The only thing that matters is how fast I can make what I want, before my cash runs out. Time is of the essence.

Displaying IMG_20170423_134425.jpg

Starts with a simple sketch, anyone can make it... data driven business application. Better not to be pretentious and call it "engine" or "framework" because it's going to be the smallest, tiniest thing I can possibly make that works end-to-end that I can build on and expand on.

How long have I thought of making this? Many months, many years. Always thought of work, responsibilities, all excuses... could have stayed to make it, but there was never the urgency. Now there is. Time to see if I have the stuff it takes.

Choice of technology will be something I can make a prototype fast with, just using a basic text editor and basic tools.

Another question is how to measure progress. I thought about using something complicated like Trello or some issue tracker, but instead I'll make a small To-Do list each day of items and complete it. Or I will just do it. Another idea.

Will write tomorrow hopefully about a working prototype.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

#6 - ES2015 / ES6, Grunt

Significant updates to my project over the past few days. Introduced grunt, modified all my JavaScript to use Babel + Grunt + ES6 style imports. All the JavaScript gets transcompiled to a dist/ directory, then the system gets executed through grunt. All works because all the paths are relative, and the correct files are copied over to the dist/ directory each time (also introduced a cleaning task). Basic stuff, but another pain that I wish I didn't have to deal with. The good thing is everything is setup on command line now, with rudimentary continuous integration (grunt watch) and a rudimentary build process. Introducing more and more utility classes, building out the foundation of the system... getting soon to the point where I can build out the system's widgets one-by-one, and hopefully my next post will be about rendering to the phone. Here's a portion of my Gruntfile.js in case anyone has trouble setting up their Babel + Grunt configuration... in particular, the key

#4 - Multi-File Configuration

Stopped counting the days, doesn't make sense with gaps. Trying to ramp up to many more hours a day.  Eventually I will be successful. Dealt with the "partial configuration" problem mentioned in the last post. Won't post that because it's very custom. I just used a recursive function to parse the JSON and if the key started with a # sign, replaced the value with other JSON. { 'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2', '#subconfig' : 'path\to\subconfig' } => { 'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2', 'subconfig' : [ ... ] } However, I will post a class I wrote to deal with JavaScript type issues. Some basic stuff. Hopefully, it is useful to someone. Uses the new ES2015 class syntax.