Prototype wrapup #6

And the wheel comes round again! last week I flagged an intention to radically scale down my prototypes in response to my thoughts on the idea triangle, the three-way tradeoff between interestingness, completeness and time. I committed to 3 prototypes in 1 hour each, and I'm happy to say I easily met that goal.

Thursday

I'd been thinking for a while about making some tools to improve the process for updating hero builds in Dota 2. So the first thing was to see if it was possible to download existing builds. This is some scripting to do that.

Friday

This is a continuation from yesterday, a script that can take a .build file and upload it back to the Dota 2 web service.

Saturday

I had a neat/scary idea for a tool I could use to overcome my initial resistance to starting a task: reverse the status quo by making the current situation unbearable! Mosquito plays a high pitched noise until you close the window, the idea being that you say you'll only close the window when you get started. This one made it into its own repo.

Sunday

I wrote about a superlative number market idea before, and I was thinking about using Pony for that. It seems like a fun super-concurrent language to do it in. I wanted to try out making a simple web service backend to test it out, but I couldn't make anything work. I don't think Pony is ready for primetime yet.

Monday

A silly idea I had after I typoed document.createElement as document.crateElement one too many times. Fixes the typo and adds a crate in the background to the elements you created. Only 71K (53K gzipped)!

As you can see, there's a pretty substantial difference between my prototype output the last week and the weeks before it. Much smaller, less ambitious prototypes, and more of them. I'm definitely happier with this approach, so much so that I'm going to commit to doing one every day for next week. This feels like a sustainable vision of the small-scale thing I've been shooting for. The ones I was doing before were really just mini-projects.

I would like to explore that space too, but all in good time.