WHOOPS! I completely forgot to write this the last two weeks.
Prelude
It occurred to me that some of you might be interested in hearing about my escapades as a programmer. Because of this, I’m going to try and post a blog post detailing what I’ve been working on at the beginning of each week. This means I’ll be detailing everything I’ve accomplished in the last 7 days. I will also be listing the takeaways from that week. This may be useful to some people so they can learn from my mistakes and successes.
Week 2
During week two, Christmas was just around the corner. Most of this week consisted of brainstorming ideas for CodeBreak. I also picked up an old project, which was basically a top-down maze shooter game. However I quickly realized why I dropped the project: I don’t really like the idea. I continued to sludge through this for a the second half of week two.
Takeaways
- If I abandon a project, there’s probably a good reason. Unless I have a better reason to start it again, then I should probably let sleeping dogs lie.
Week 3
Week 3 was far more interesting. Early in the week I threw out the space shooter game again, and began working on a few new projects. The first project is called StatusFrost. It’s a google chrome extension that tracks user actions, much in the same way advertisers do, but instead of selling that information, it’s displayed to the user. This was inspired by my compulsive need to know my typing speed. StatusFrost was finished about half way through the week and published it on the webstore here. It had a decent reception, with around 8 daily users, which doesn’t sound like much, but I’ll take what I can get! After stability, I worked mostly on UI improvements and fixing some bugs that made it into production due to my lack of testing.
Takeaways
- Testing before production is always a good idea. I already knew this, but it’s always good to be reminded of this
- Releasing something, no matter how silly, small, or useless it is, is an amazing and rewarding feeling. This has been consistent for every project of mine that’s made it to this phase.