Prototype Wrapup #4
A bit of a backslide since last week. I committed to 3 prototypes of at most 3 hours each. Unfortunately, I only did one:
Docs in a box
This is an attempt at an instant docs idea I've wanted to try out for a while. I mostly Google for reference documentation because it ends up being the fastest way to find it. What I'd rather have is a live-search that displays just the minimal documentation I need as quickly as possible. Part of that was figuring out a good way to deal with all that documentation data. I ended up leaning pretty heavily on PouchDB and CouchDB, and I'm fairly satisfied that they were the right tools for that job.
Time: 3 hours.
Although I did less prototypes than I wanted to, I also think I did a better job at keeping that prototype more modest than my previous ones. I resisted the urge to make the scope wider than it needed to be, and I aggressively cut tempting time sinks like supporting multiple documentation sources (though the design should make it easy to add that later). I want these prototypes to be small enough to explore one idea in code, the same way the writing I do here is small enough to explore one idea in words.
I obviously haven't figured that out well enough yet, and I still find myself leaving the prototypes until too late in the week despite the decrease in size. I'm hopeful this is a temporary blip mostly caused by the extra effort I put in to get the prototypes done last week and the subsequent change in focus. I'm going to just commit to the same thing again for next week, and if I'm still having trouble then I'll look into a more sophisticated strategy.