I’ve gone more than 24 hours without writing a single line of code, without drawing a flow diagram or opening up Google Keep and writing a list of requirements for some random idea I’ve just had.
This is strange for me; writing code at the end of the day is my equivalent of reading a book before turning off the light – my escapism is switching off from the chaotic world of people and decisions and simply following the rules of syntax to achieve an obtainable goal. Making the test pass or seeing the UI behave the way I wanted it to is a little win at the end of my day.
Interestingly I’m now a little more thoughtful about the idea of opening up an IDE. My day without code has happened at a point in time where I’m “between personal projects” and I genuinely don’t know which one to work on next.
I’ve still got open source projects I commit to, Alexa.Net and my own Alexa.Net.Management are a constant source of enjoyment for me – a fallback for when I hit an unexpected problem in my personal project and I need to just chill out with a new PR
Currently I have choices and I’m not sure which to dedicate time to:
A rewrite of my Tumblr app DashBuddy
It works, but it’s old and I could do more with the UI if I put my mind to it.
The new Fluent Design from Microsoft gives me an opportunity to really try and make things pretty – get used to the new APIs they’re exposing and get back into UWP – which I love!
Mock OAuth2 Provider
This one is an idea I’ve had for a while as I’ve struggled with OAuth2 work. The problem I’ve had in the past is that you want to prove something can work – an app, a site, anything. And to do that you want to link it to your system. You just want to grab a token from your test account and go – show it off.
But now you have to worry about setting up your OAuth providers, making sure the permissions are correct and that you’ll end up getting the result you want. What if you could just go to a single site that creates an OAuth client and instead of an authorization page for provider X and account Y with just the right permissions, it gives you a box and asks you for the access token you want to work with? No refresh token capability – the token stored for single use and removed as soon as your app successfully asks for it.
Comic strip mobile app
Ever since I was able to write my first Facebook App (Which I wrote when Facebook Markup Language was still a thing, Google it – it was…interesting) I’ve been interested in adding comic strip style art to images I own. There’s a PNG I own with dozens of them and I’ve tried writing the same functionality in almost every language I’ve tried.
I know apps already exist that can do this sort of thing – but I’m still interested in seeing what my attempt would feel like, there’s so much fine detail in terms of text size and positioning, outlines and colouring, it feels like something I could really build on.
Anyway – this is what’s going around my head right now and I’m not planning to do “File->New” until I’m sure I know which one I’m picking.