Keeping track of programming projects over the years


Blog, Computers, Writing / Wednesday, May 28th, 2014

I know for years and years I’ve teased different programming projects, among others, I’m working on here (hell, this website was initially a programming project–I wrote an entire blogging platform from scratch as a proof of concept; it was primitive, but I loved the software and only switch to WordPress as it was easier to maintain). More often than not, they didn’t amount to much. Part of me thinks that my writing about them on here caused me to lose interest in them. That’s not true. I may have stopped working on them temporarily indefinitely, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still interest me. More often than not, newer projects are just evolutions of old ones.

Previous Projects

Take, for example, the Self-Directed Learning programming project I started working on during Peace Corps training. I raved about it (password: whitewater) to anyone and everyone that I could in both person and print. I did so because I felt very proud of it. I also had plans for it. It was going to revolutionize my language learning. It was going to revolutionize all language learning. Then I lost steam. I still produced a product, but it’s far from where I imagined it going. I got caught up in Peace Corps life and projects and learning by interacting. The result is out there, you can take a look at my Russian SDL as long as I have it hosted, but I doubt I’ll improve on it.

Then there are the countless times I’ve teased new website designs. Those more often than not come to fruition in some way shape or form. Granted, my most recent design was much more radical when I started but that’s just how my design evolved.

And also the times that I’ve teased new image projects (I haven’t done one in a while). I like to change-up my social media icon from time to time (no more often than yearly) and I like to tell people about it because I’m excited about it. It’s another project that I get excited about.

For a while, I was really excited about another language programming project, but in English this time around. I teased it a few times on this blog and a few more times on Google+. The posts on this blog can be found here and here. While developing the project, I ran into a couple of roadblocks. One of these roadblocks was that one of the things I wanted the project to do was far beyond my programming capabilities and would need possibly years of dedicated study to get to a respectable level of knowledge. All that being said, I’m still immensely proud of the work I was able to get done on it. I never did get around to posting the project for general use, but it can be found here: http://sassyhacksaws.com/grammar/ The project is meant to analyze a text and point out areas where the text can be improved. I wish I could have gotten it to a point where it preserved the formatting, or at least line breaks, during the analysis but I didn’t see it as essential functionality during my first programming and have since stopped working on it. Feel free to play with it, I use it a lot when I need to proof documents as it points out a few things I’d overlook if I was just reading.

The Current Programming Project

My next and current programming project, the one I’m going to tease here and probably lose steam on shortly, is going to be a bit of a conglomerate of all the projects I’ve worked on over the years. I won’t go into full details on the project as I want it to be a surprise and I’d like to keep someone from reading this and thinking they can do it better and faster than me. Not that I don’t want them to, I just don’t want to stumble across the same idea executed by someone else and get discouraged with my slow progress. That being said, I’m working on a plugin for WordPress. I’ve already got the initial features sketched out and some of the initial framework in place. I’m starting from scratch when it comes to WordPress plugins. I know very little about integrating my code with the existing system, but I’m learning as I go and using things I’ve learned before to speed up the process.

When I’m done with the initial release, I know it’s going to be something that I’m really proud of. It’s designed to fill a gap in the WordPress software and to fill a gap in my life. Hell, this plugin I’m working on might actually be efficient enough at what it does for me to switch my computer over to Linux full-time (one of the main things that keeps me from switching is that I can’t find all the software I need in Linux, and this would be one of the major ones crossed off).

Disclaimer

Before I sign off, I just want to say that I make no promises on when it will be done, if ever. It’s a slow process because I work on it when I have the free time and the free time isn’t always there. I might just get distracted and eventually it will turn into something else down the road. I’ll never know.

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