Anything worth doing is worth doing right
My day-to-day work has transitioned almost completely away from development, however I’ve been working on a tool in my personal time for my group to use (potentially). Getting back in to development has reminded me of a few small truths:
- I still love Safari
- Rails has changed a lot in the last year
- I really don’t spend much of my free time at the computer these days
- script.aculo.us is still pretty cool
As the last truth might hint, this app has the most JavaScript intensive interfaces that I’ve ever done. I’ve made small hacks and effects using JavaScript and AJAX before, but never got far enough into it to get beyond eye candy. The interface to my application has been through a ton of iterations so far, basically as I learn more and more I keep trying to go back and improve my older code (even though in many cases older is only a few days or a few hours old). As this is a free time project, I don’t have any kind of deadline or anything so I get to really develop something that I’m very proud of without external pressure to sacrifice on some aspect of it.
Coding as work often times results in the need to make trade-offs as a result of external factors, but some of the coolest things I’ve ever made spawned out of tinkering in my spare time.