It seems to be en vouge at the moment to challenge yourself to develop an application a month and do so in public. These apps tend to be AI driven, very slick, with their own landing pages etc. I wanted to stretch myself this year and increase the cadence of my development and so a 12 Apps in 12 Months challenge sounded like a good idea.
But not like that!
While a challenge seemed like a good idea, I didn’t want to be producing apps just for the sake of it. I felt that for it to be worthwhile, I had to be developing something that would be of use to me. If I released it and someone else found it and believed it to be useful to them, then great, but if not, then fine.
My primary skill is PHP, and my interests seem to be well served by a large number of APIs, so the ideas I have for the first few projects will make use of both. There will be no glamorous and glossy front ends, something that I am notoriously bad at, so the user interfaces will no doubt be utilitarian at best and probably command-line driven. Very much the antithesis of what others seem to be doing.
What am I Hoping to Achieve?
Having started my career as a developer before, like so many, stepping away as I moved into more managerial positions, I have returned to it now I have retired and have remembered just how much I loved it. Like these blog posts it is a great creative outlet for me. I do consider development to be an art form of sorts and see beauty in code where others just see a jumble of letters.
I am hoping that these simple projects will:
- primarily bring me enjoyment
- provide something of use and value to me
- improve me code
- help me learn new skills whether that is a new language, AI prompt engineering or mastering grep.
The First Release – January
The first release in this exercise is a great example of what I am talking about – jolpica2Ergast was born out of a need I had where a tool that I had used for years announced that it was shutting down. I needed to find a replacement as my website relied on it. A replacement was duly found but this was an API where the previous was a database dump. This is exactly the sort of tool that I suggested above I would be doing – something that has great value to me, might be useful to one or two others and has an ugly interface!
Next Steps
Look out for the next project which will be coming in February and you can follow all the posts in this series here.