For a long time now, I have been increasingly bothered by my lack of Open Source contributions on GitHub 1 and of real world projects to put on my portfolio and resume.
Everyday, practically, for the past two months, I have been irritated, by my lack of production. I have the skill to build projects but all I was doing, am doing, is learning, being stuck in the tutorial loop my buddy Alex Gwartney and Nick Queen talked about on Developer Soup 2.
Forcing Ideas
Thinking about building projects, having ideas, for those projects, or coming up with ideas is the hardest part of the whole thing.
For weeks I have been researching a library to build to open source, but I really couldn’t think of much. An XML to JSON parser? Been done. Opening up a new terminal with Node on macOS? Meh.
I took to Code Newbie Slack to ask around. Someone gave a suggestion but he said he personally tries to not force things like that.
That made a lot of sense to me. The block I was in was because I was looking for things to code that I didn’t need or was just forcing the idea just to have an open source project to my name. That isn’t a great idea.
Good Programmers Scratch Their Own Itch
I was sitting down to write an article in Ulysses, which I always do, because of the markdown features. I am often frustrated my editing and finding grammatical errors and such because apps like Grammarly and Hemingway get upset when you paste in Markdown.
I came up with the idea of tapping into an API for checking the grammar of markdown documents.
It’s something I need. It’s something people have done in a way but at the command line and now in a broader scope. So I’ve found my project.
Coding the Thing
I am using Material Design Lite for the UI.
I’ve gathered a few snippets for elements that I’d like to use the most important one being for the modal polyfill for the <dialog> tag as most browsers don’t support it:
(function() {
'use strict';
var dialog = document.querySelector('#modal-example');
var closeButton = dialog.querySelector('button');
var showButton = document.querySelector('#show-modal-example');
if (! dialog.showModal) {
dialogPolyfill.registerDialog(dialog);
}
var closeClickHandler = function(event) {
dialog.close();
};
var showClickHandler = function(event) {
dialog.showModal();
};
showButton.addEventListener('click', showClickHandler);
closeButton.addEventListener('click', closeClickHandler);
}());
This is just one example of the way you could use the polyfill.
Diving In = Happiness
Spent a lot of time looking at documentation and pumping out a little bit of the HTML. Still trying to wrap my head around where to go and how so I am probably going to make a mindmap in MindNode and export it to TaskPaper or OmniFocus. But either way, I need to find some structure in this to actually know how to go forward.
Building things makes me extremely happy and want to get out of bed and work. I actually got out of bed in the morning instead of mid-afternoon because I knew there was interesting work waiting for me.
It’s a good time to be alive, that’s for sure. :-D
For a long time now, I have been increasingly bothered by my lack of Open Source contributions on GitHub 1 and of real world projects to put on my portfolio and resume.
Everyday, practically, for the past two months, I have been irritated, by my lack of production. I have the skill to build projects but all I was doing, am doing, is learning, being stuck in the tutorial loop my buddy Alex Gwartney and Nick Queen talked about on Developer Soup 2.
Forcing Ideas
Thinking about building projects, having ideas, for those projects, or coming up with ideas is the hardest part of the whole thing.
For weeks I have been researching a library to build to open source, but I really couldn’t think of much. An XML to JSON parser? Been done. Opening up a new terminal with Node on macOS? Meh.
I took to Code Newbie Slack to ask around. Someone gave a suggestion but he said he personally tries to not force things like that.
That made a lot of sense to me. The block I was in was because I was looking for things to code that I didn’t need or was just forcing the idea just to have an open source project to my name. That isn’t a great idea.
Good Programmers Scratch Their Own Itch
I was sitting down to write an article in Ulysses, which I always do, because of the markdown features. I am often frustrated my editing and finding grammatical errors and such because apps like Grammarly and Hemingway get upset when you paste in Markdown.
I came up with the idea of tapping into an API for checking the grammar of markdown documents.
It’s something I need. It’s something people have done in a way but at the command line and now in a broader scope. So I’ve found my project.
Coding the Thing
I am using Material Design Lite for the UI.
I’ve gathered a few snippets for elements that I’d like to use the most important one being for the modal polyfill for the <dialog> tag as most browsers don’t support it:
(function() {
'use strict';
var dialog = document.querySelector('#modal-example');
var closeButton = dialog.querySelector('button');
var showButton = document.querySelector('#show-modal-example');
if (! dialog.showModal) {
dialogPolyfill.registerDialog(dialog);
}
var closeClickHandler = function(event) {
dialog.close();
};
var showClickHandler = function(event) {
dialog.showModal();
};
showButton.addEventListener('click', showClickHandler);
closeButton.addEventListener('click', closeClickHandler);
}());
This is just one example of the way you could use the polyfill.
Diving In = Happiness
Spent a lot of time looking at documentation and pumping out a little bit of the HTML. Still trying to wrap my head around where to go and how so I am probably going to make a mindmap in MindNode and export it to TaskPaper or OmniFocus. But either way, I need to find some structure in this to actually know how to go forward.
Building things makes me extremely happy and want to get out of bed and work. I actually got out of bed in the morning instead of mid-afternoon because I knew there was interesting work waiting for me.
It’s a good time to be alive, that’s for sure. :-D
