This was meant to facilitate daily meetings in our team. You see, we used to do this thing where each person took a turn then "passed the ball" onto someone of their choosing. It was a fun way to keep everyone engaged and involved.
The problem this app solves is that it helps people keep track of who's talked so far and allows the current speaker to pick the next one. Also, if anyone had a question or a topic to discuss, they could raise their hand.
At least it would have, if I had finished it.
I'd finished reading the atomic habits book (great read, by the way) and was feeling inspired to build a habit tracker. I was so motivated with this one.
I started thinking of all the features I could add, like streaks, reminders, and a bunch of other stuff. I made a bunch of designs on figma and then ... nothing.
I think working on the designs was the most fun part of this project. But I should've started coding it sooner.
Lesson learned: don't get too caught up in the details.
This would've been a vscode extension that allowed the user to change the parameters of a dart function between named and positional, and vice versa.
Made a bunch of decent progress on this one, and then got to a place where I realized that simply changing the function signature wasn't enough. I'd have to change all the calls to that function as well using the Dart language server aaaaaand that's right about when I started procrastinating.
And today, here it lies.
Oh what ambitious plans I had for this one. I was going to recreate the Udemy website (with a minimal amount of working features) in multiple frontend frameworks. Angular, Vue, NextJS, Svelte Qwik, Solidjs.
I made a backend with NestJS, then wrote the first frontend with Angular.
Then I started the next frontend with nextjs (the pages router) and then things sort of started to slow down. The pages router was a bit difficult to work with compared to Angular's router.
And then life happened. Job demands increased significantly, and I sort of blocked out the project from my mind.
One day, I was getting in the elevator and someone was approaching it like 10 meters behind me. Being the polite person I am, I proceeded to try to close the door as quickly as possible so I save that person from an awkward silence.
The elevator, of course, had other plans. The button to manually close the doors simply didn't give a crap at my sad attempts at avoiding the most basic of human interactions and wouldn't close the door.
This button wasn't taking some sort of revenge on me, it had always had a mind of its own.
It got me thinking, "How did this basic elevator get so messed up? What is so hard about making an elevator circuit? I could probably do it in a day!"
I got to making a really simple javascript app/site that allowed you to control an elevator.
You can see it on https://... oh wait, I never finished it.
Turns out, elevators are a bit more complicated than I thought.
Again with the ambitious plans. I wanted to make a video player with my own customizations.
I discovered that the HTML video player is actually quite customizable. You can change the controls, the colors, the layout, and a bunch of other stuff.
The problem was that this video player was too shallow. Yeah it played videos, but it couldn't handle anything else, like subtitles, video streaming, different qualities, etc.
Apparently, something like that would be a bit complicated. So complicated, in fact, that there is an entire library built by many people much smarter than me to handle it.
Whatever tiny bit of motivation I had at this point was gone. It
looks pretty though. also taught me how much we take for granted with software.
Back in my college days, I'd found a nice and simple repeatable pattern for making desktop apps with python and pyqt. I wanted to make a framework out of it so that I could use it for future apps.
The thing is, I left it so bare bones that it was barely a framework. It was just a bunch of random files with some code in them.
So much manual labor is involved for adding even a simple button, let alone make an entire app.
We have electron now, so whatever. It was a good learning experience.
This was one of my first big boy projects. It taught me so much about programming, databases, interfaces, and state management.
Looking back at it, I have no idea where I had the audacity to think I could make a GUI for a database. I didn't even know what a database really was.
Nevertheless, I made a bunch of progress on it. I could connect to a database, see the collections, and even add and remove documents.
At some point, I realized that I was just making a really bad version of MongoDB Compass. So I cut my losses and moved on.
Makes me feel a bit nostalgic.
Back in college, I started seriously obsessing about web scraping. It made me feel... POWERFUL! All the data in the world was at my fingertips.
I made a lot of web scraper scripts but then I noticed I was re-writing a lot of the same code across them. Also, whenever I finished a script, I would learn something new that I would have to go back and add to all the other scripts.
And so, the basic-web-scraper library was born. Used by a grand total of 1 people.
It was my first ever published library. I'm still proud of it. I even wrote tests for it.