(#2) Things to read + musings - March 7, 2021

I started a mini side project! Plus more things on my mind to read.

Found two blog posts via a guy I follow on twitter for crow pic posts, who also seems to distill on-point programming advice:

• Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend.

• Repeat yourself, do more than one thing, and rewrite everything

I also just tried this game by @linhtropy and learned more about Bitsy and bitsy jams:

• its been a while since i went for a walk

  🌊🐉Cyberpunk Shonen Anime Protagonist @linhtropy

  If you're looking for a chill short game to relax to and let your mind wander and get introspective while looking at pretty clouds and pastel color palettes, then maybe "its been a while since I went for a walk" is right up your alley ☁️

  

  linhtropy.itch.ioits been a while since i went for a walk by linhtropy☁️you go for a short walk and think about stuff (bitsy jam cloud theme) ☁️

• A Bitsy Tutorial

• bitsy on itch.io

In other news, I also started on a new side project for probably the second time ever as a working professional. The first time was to create a personal website during a holiday break (potentially 2019?). I got as far as putting up a “Under Construction” static page on a Digital Ocean droplet hosting a docker container.

Though I’ve wanted to create a personal website for as long as I can remember being interested in web dev (probably as far back as high school, far before I decided to become a software engineer), I find that I usually stumble when it comes to fleshing out a final vision that I can work backwards from. Hosting a website now also seems more complicated than ever, if you aim to do anything more elaborate than html, css, and nginx.

So this time I decided to scrap the “personal website as personal expression” (see one example for inspiration) idea for now and start on something very small-scoped to build iteratively on, trusting small identifiable chunks of work to be more motivating than realizing the perfect personal website/blog. It could even be the impetus for me to create a very small-scoped personal website later to host or link to the project and others like it, that I could then expand upon organically instead of working from the complete vision down.

That meant something that starts out locally, unhosted, and even potentially completely client-side without a server to start out with. Going further, no state is persisted in the client side, and I’m not worried about users yet.

This was that project:

Electra Chong @electra_chong

I'm proud of this dumb little html/vanilla JS browser game I made inspired by dumping eggs in the mineral spring in Harvest Moon. It's an mvp that I was able to code up in a couple hours. 😭

I’m proud because I’ve never been able to allocate much time to a side project before as a working professional, at least for these first four years, which is probably another topic in its own right that I’ll defer for now.