Somewhere to put what I'm building
Projects, experiments, and a few notes about how they come together.
I wanted a place to write about the things I'm making, so I made this blog.
A lot of my projects start with something I want for myself. An app does the job, but using it feels more complicated than it needs to be. Or I have an idea and want to see if I can make it work. That's usually enough to get me started.
It doesn't necessarily mean there's anything wrong with the tools that already exist. Sometimes I just want something different, and making it myself sounds interesting. Whether that turns out to be a quick experiment or a much longer project is another question.
What I'll write about
Mostly software projects, but that leaves room for quite a few things: desktop apps, websites, game mods, and experiments that might never become something I release.
For a new app, I'd like to explain why I made it and what it does. But I also want to get into specific parts of the work. A feature can sound straightforward until you try to implement it. Then you find out that the awkward part is somewhere you hadn't even thought about.
Those are the details I'd like to write about here. What the problem looked like while I was using the app, what I tried to change, and what happened after that. Code can be part of the explanation, but I don't want a post to be just a list of frameworks and libraries.
There's also room for things that didn't work out. An approach can make sense at first and still turn out to be more trouble than it's worth. I'd rather explain why I dropped it than leave that part out and make the whole process sound obvious.
Why a blog?
When I share a finished project, most of the conversation is about what it can do now. Here, I can spend more time explaining how I built it, without trying to fit everything into a release announcement.
Writing it down should be useful for me too. Once I've moved on to something else, I don't always remember why I made a particular choice. Having the explanation somewhere will be better than trying to reconstruct it months later.
And if someone else runs into a similar problem, maybe a post here will save them some time. Or they might know a better way to do it. I'd be interested in that too.
I don't have a posting schedule in mind. Some subjects will need a longer post; others won't. I'll write when I have something to share.