This is a mirror post from reaper.im/blog
I've done this quite a few times when it comes to implementing minimal design across tools and apps that I build.
So in this post I talked about why I re-designed the todo app, when all I wanted to do was a add a filtering functionality but then I redesigned the whole thing.
And technically, the idea for the colors was taken from the UI i was writing for the markdown editor which then ended up being the inspiration for me to modify the UI of commitlog-web through which I created a small library called themer and now I'm sitting here writing this post indirectly back linking to everything I've created in the past 1.5 days just because I liked the input style I made for a markdown editor.
And this has happened before, I got inspired by lancerlist.co and ended up cloning that color scheme to all the apps I built that week/month.
From memory, I probably built a css resets library that cloned the color scheme of lancerlist and maybe a dummy hiring network and a covid tracker that probably doesn't work anymore.
I know it's not bad to do make something look good.
but! then I think that I do end up spending a lot of time doing this re-design and making things look clean than actually working on something meaningful that'd help a lot of people instead of just building stuff that I'd use, though none of them were ever launched or promoted as products / tools for the greater good so maybe I'm to blame for that.
Like, I could write a new repl.it clone that didn't need you to sign up and create a new repl and then get to coding but just open a url and boom, a repl to test snippets on, but then obviously the other guys wants to make a living out of it so I can't blame him but nope, I'm going to write a dark mode setup library (cause there's not enough of them already)
I mean, I learn a lot while building these smaller tools and apps but then it's not something I can go to the market with or actually earn from it. Obviously there are developers like Sindre and Drew Devault that actually make a living out of open source projects , both with totally different methods but both are full time open source developers.
Argh, Offtopic!
I was talking about building useful stuff for people to use, that reminds me commitlog reached about 48 stars at the time of writing this, so that's really nice but let's see if I can build a lot more tools that work well in everyone's workflow.
I want to try writing a bundler for once, the existing ones are good but then they all assume the developer workflow a lot. Other than webpack and rollup, which are really extensible and hence people create wrappers around them. Anyway, I need to know what would be a better idea ? An online instant repl environment or a bundler?
I guess you can mail in the answer, but for now.
Adios!
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