Prototype Wrapup #3
Well, things are improving somewhat on the prototype front since last time. I committed to 3 and I got 3 done. That's technically a 200% increase. Victory!
Devrouter
This one came from a place of deep personal frustration. I'm always running lots of little webservers on my computer for development, and since each one needs a unique port number I end up having all sorts of ridiculousness: 3000, 3001, 4000, 8000, 8080, 8081. I forget which ones are which and sometimes end up trying to run things on the same port. In production this is exactly the kind of thing HTTP solves with virtual hosts, so I decided I'd make a local HTTP router to do the same thing. Ended up taking a bit more time than I thought because there was a lot of ridiculous DNS nonsense, but all told it was pretty under control, and the end result has already saved me a lot of annoyance.
Time: 5 hours.
Pass-scene
I've had an idea for a while about generating more memorable passphrases by making the random words fit into a semi-meaningful sentence. Think "the {noun} {verb}s at {time}" kind of thing. In theory it would be possible to build even quite long scenes by sequencing actions and so on. Anyway, in trying to find decent word lists I ran headlong into the total devastation that is semantic web/natural language processing. It was all I could do to just get something that vaguely worked out the door, and I'm still not really that happy with it. It works okay as a proof of concept though.
Time: 10 hours.
Automaintainer
This is a bot to manage contributors and pull requests on GitHub. I wrote about it ages ago and I'd even done some really early exploration with GitHub's API, but never actually pulled the trigger to make something that worked. Well, now I have and it seems pretty good. It only supports a couple of rules so far, but I built in the ones I wanted and it's already self-hosting (ie automaintainer is managing the automaintainer repo). If all goes well I'll be able to start using it for my other projects as well.
Time: 6 hours.
So I really pulled out some stops and stayed up to get this bunch over the line, mostly because I was sick of failing at my commitment. I can see though that the prototypes are still too complicated to make a feasible everyday activity. In my first week I noted that I would either need to accept only being able to manage a few project-sized prototypes, or figure out how to scale down.
I want to push a bit harder on that latter angle, so for next week I'm committing to do 3 prototypes in under 3 hours each. If I do something that takes more than 3 hours, it's a project and it doesn't count. That's harsher than I'd normally be, but I think I need to learn how to do less if this is going to work.