One project a month in 2023
One idea I had in mind in January last year was to try different things, or build up some prototypes, just to satisfy my curiosity. One year later, I can say mission accomplished! But what did I do, after all? Let's look back.
In January, I experimented with self-hosting various tools in a low-maintenance format. I ended up adopting YunoHost to handle some tools like my news feeds, project tracking, online visits counter and more. Since installing it, it's been very easy to use without requiring me to waste time just trying to keep it running, so I consider this a pretty big win.
In February, I wanted to experiment with the Fediverse in some way or another. I compared some of the various platforms and ended up adopting Misskey, hosted on the YunoHost from January. It's now open to the public and running smoothly, but the updates to it haven't followed as expected – I might need to look at an alternative since it's now several months and a major version out of date.
Mars saw me putting a focus on push notifications. Now that iOS 16.1 supports them for web apps, I wanted to exploit them to reach as many people as possible. That's now live in the Creeper's Lab Companion for all platforms, giving people an opportunity to stay updated on the latest news if they want to. This work will be reused for Osmium later.
April was a time of experimentation about chat alternatives. Discord is working well for us, but I don't want to grow too attached to a platform I don't control, so I did some experiments with XMPP and Matrix. These didn't go too far due to various technical and software limits. I'll have to revisit this.
May was dedicated to spring cleaning on the Creeper's Lab. Nothing extraordinary happened; instead, I used the opportunity to smooth out some rough edges and improve the automation of some components. Shiny new things are good, keeping what you already have is even better!
Part of June went into building a prototype for a news reader, as I was looking to develop an alternative to simply following sources on social media. I ended up shelving the project after discovering that existing tools like Inoreader already do pretty much everything I had in mind.
July went into studying tools integrating (but not requiring!) Discord. Unlike the chat search from April, this was all about building different methods to access the same things, like a tighter forum integration. I polished an existing prototype while drafting some other concepts. Part of this is still on the drawing board.
August is when I decided to put an extra effort on improving my online presence. I finally figured out a simple web address that's all about me (interordi.com/stephane) while making an effort on my visibility on some social media platforms. I still have a lot more to do on this – I offer various tools and online communities, but people need to know they exist... and that I'm behind them!
An exception happened in September, where I used my available time to play catch-up on various things. I was feeling rather overwhelmed at the time, so rather than spread myself too thin by playing with something new, I focused on getting back in control of everything happening at the time.
October was basically split in half, as I was on vacations during the first half. The second had all my energy going into the launch of Osmium, which finally happened after so many efforts!
November is when I decided to make a push to add new achievements to the Creeper's Lab. This had been planned for a long time, I finally had all the building blocks together, so it was time to assemble them. This was a big hit with the community, proving that the effort was worth it!
Closing the year in December, I've looked at replacing the JavaScript library I use for pie charts, line graphs and the like. The one I was relying on was getting old and difficult to use. I ended up adopting Chart.js as a modern alternative that's much more flexible. It's not integrated on any visible page yet, but I've been preparing its integration in several places.
And that's it for a year! Some of these took time to do, others happened across a single Saturday or two, but forcing myself to have a different target every month ensured I wasn't just doing standard dev work. This gave me an opening to do a few things that I was already thinking about but never had the opportunity to make happen. I'm considering doing something similar this year, if only to see if some of my ideas are worth pursuing or not!
– Doctacosa