I've been trying to focus on working on side-projects lately, but I did not have any specific project in mind. I was bouncing between learning, first steps in projects, and resting.
I want to get more focused, and because of that, I am writing what I want to focus on for the next 3 months. Mostly, I want to learn and make something that would solve one of my own issues. If I want to be able to solve a real-world problem, I need to get myself out there, and solving an issue that I have myself would be a nice way to get started.
The issue that I want to solve is to get a way to capture what I get through my mind easily. Todo items, events, ideas, notes… I want to be able to capture all of this very quickly, without having to think too much about it. Since I want to make it available for the public, I want it to be behind a web interface. But to avoid having too much to do, the first client will be a simple CLI tool.
Thinking about the choice of technology, I previously wanted to keep learning Rust. However, after having worked with it for a bit now, I feel like the feedback loop is too slow for my easily distracted mind. So I want to use one of my innovation tokens, and go with common lisp for it. There are two main reasons for that: One of the fastest feedback loop using REPL driven development which will also probably lead to quick prototyping, stability of the language, and possibility to get to a very efficient implementation.
The main problem ? I don't know the language yet.
For that, I will be studying the Practical Common Lisp book as a prelude to this project. I have already looked through it, but I need more experience with it. And to ensure I "loose" even more time only learning, I will also go through the How To Design Programs book as well. This is one I want to go through both for personal knowledge and projects, and for professional ones.
To summarize, Here is my plan for the next three months.
- Read and learn How To Design Programs
- Get the basics of Common lisp using Practical Common Lisp
- Get a prototype for my capture tool with CLI interface
See you in three months for review on these goals