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What did you do this weekend?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
Continuing to work on my web app. Instead of half-assing it and letting the idea rot in a hard drive like every past project, I'm trying really hard to make it into a finished product that I can be proud of. Something that is mostly bug-free, that anyone can try and use. I've even solicited the help of a graphic designer to make some illustrations for the homepage. I still have a lot on my todo list, it seems endless!
I feel you, my projects directory is full of these. Many of them where I just gave up after tinkering around at the tech stack stage. My toxic perfectionism never wants to work on a MVP that could introduce any technical debt that could hurt future the project so I over engineer it to the point that it's so overwhelming to work on that I don't want to.
Good luck! My advice: iterate early and often. The biggest project failures I've ever had were where I expected too much of myself, and wanted "1.0" or "x.0" to be these amazing releases with features which make people go "wow". My standards were too high—realistically, most projects are a team of one, and you need to act like it. Prioritise what features really matter, too. If you're building an app that you want to earn money, you actually probably don't need to build in the payment functionality till like v2 or v3.
That's not to say don't push the bar high, but a scrappy initial release is better than no release at all. Happy coding!
Take a trip? Hah!
On Saturday I spent pretty much the entire evening talking to friends over Zoom. One at 4, going until 6:30, another from 8 to 9, and another from 9 to 11 or so (that last one being a D&D campaign). It was really pleasant to be able to catch up. My one solace during the quarantine is that I have internet access and can still reach out to the people that are important to me.
I also sat down and read the entirety of The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho yesterday. It's a comforting book in many ways, and I'm glad I read it. It was more than on the nose, although I can't really expect differently from an allegorical novel. I was very taken with the articulation of one's Personal Legend that he provides, and I think that the book has encouraged me not to give mine up just yet.
I participated and won the Pokemon Go regional tournament for my area, much to my surprise. I have the option to advance to the continental tournament if I choose to, with roughly 100 participants in North America. Not sure what the plan for that is with the virus shaking up everything but we will see, I guess.
I made a huge batch of cannabutter with old weed I had stored in jars. I then proceeded to burn the fuck out of my mouth with cannabutter that was heated up too hot.
Other than that:
I've been on lockdown for over a month.
Yet I still managed to get a common 24 hour flu.
I made a game for a game jam called Ludum Dare, it was actually the tenth time I participated in it so that's pretty cool!
It was finally nice enough to go for a bike ride with the kid, so that's what we did. Also a few walks. Cleaned up the back yard and prepping for planting the garden.
We've been getting a lot of precipitation in the form of snow in our province and it's been on the cooler side. Bit of a double edge sword, in that we want to be outside more, but on the other hand, the wild fires that are still burning up North from last year can't really get out of control and reduce our air quality.
Today is going to be the first day that I'm really wishing I could go sit on a pub patio though.
Saturday, spouse and I did yard cleanup and brush-clearing on the property of the house we can't live in yet. I double-dug 22 m2 of garden and cleared another 15 m2 of overgrown beds. So I spent Sunday on the couch recovering...
I participated in the Ludum Dare with 2 other people: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/looking-for-group
We did a really cool project where you control a cleric and try to keep your party alive during your journey to find the dragon. We coded the game using MonoGame and built the whole engine from scratch (~2500 lines of horrible code in 2 days). I coded an animation system from scratch, that was pretty fun.
As I said my mother made some face masks since she knows how to use a knitting machine. I forgot to tell you she went to but to bit the materials before and sold some of them after. She said some of the the dealers sounded like drug traders which isn't too surprising given the frenetic pace of 25 de Março (March) and othwr areas in downtown São Paulo. She also went to sell most of them in open street markets which exist here in Brazil and look like this but far less fancy. Sometimes the difference between the world I live in (as in the media and news I consume in mostly Tildes and reddit mostly focused on the US and Europe by people from those regions) and the world I actually physically live in (poor Brazilian raised in some unremarkable periphery region in São Paulo) is damning.