Over the last couple weeks I've been working on a simple electron app 😄 there has been some anger, some love, but mainly there has been code!

Let me tell you about my journey

😧 JavaScript in 2020

You know I'm not an old person (at least I don't want to be known as an old person - not yet, I guess I am nearing the big 3-0 👀. Any way I feel like anyone picking up JavaScript (or as the cool kids call it ECMAScript) won't remember the old days, or should I say the days before node was a "thing".

Don't get me wrong I am NOT nostalgic for those days in anyway shape or form, the days where you downloaded a file, added it to your file system and then added a script tag into your html shudder. that's how it was done in my day.

These days we have node, npm - and let me tell you I was there for all of these innovations in the langauage but as a .Net developer I never really took much notice of them - I was mainly a backend developer.

Couple years ago I got a job as a developer in a website company and we started work on this hideously complex frontend and it felt like we were coding in c++, having to include things in the right order.

Then I looked into some of these technologies that I had been hearing passing coments webpack, TypeScript, Node, and I quickly got overwhelmed and kind of wrote it off.

Since then I have had a few projects where I've been playing around more nad more with Javacript. I wouldn't say I'm it's biggest fan but I get it - I get why people use it.

📜 The Project

You know when I'm working on a project I'm constantly making notes, on confluence (which I personally hate but you know...) in vscode, but I am also constantly forgetting where I put these things. So I thought to myself - you know what I need, I need somewhere where I can have bookmarks, not just to websites but to files, but I want to organise things by project. You know what else would be sweet? a todo list that has repeatable tasks that keep popping onto your list to say "Hey this needs attention".

I started looking around for something that would have my needs in mind, I mena just the bookmarking tool would be nice, and you know what I was faced with?

This:

Now I don't blame companies for wanting to do this, obviosuly they need to make money, but all I wanted to do was to group my bookmarks into categories.... It couldn't be that hard right?

🔖 The pain

So I decided then and there that I was going to start my own bookmarking tool with hookers and blackjack..... More like electron and React 😄, no real reason I chose these technolgies, I tried the .Net Blazor + Electron dev experience and it was .... lacking, with JavaScript I got immediate reloads and was a lot faster.

So I started my own little thing, it was really slow going, the most of the pain was in the actual setup of the project, every tutorial seemed to be out of date, documentation lacking I had to piece things together. I found my hardest hurdle was actually getting the thing to build and render, and when I finally did it felt like a massive relief.

Doin a little bit every day

This is the application, it's really nothing fancy but it works, and it's a massive relief just to be here! Over the next couple weeks I'm going to be tidying things up and hopefully producing a build so that more people can consume it, oh yeah - it's open source 😄

I'm happy to share more of my story if people are interested but yeah - I'm a little happy with my progress so far so here I am looking for other peoples approval and to prove to people that even after years of working as a dev that new things can be scary and hard but persistence wins out th day 😄

Have a joyous day friends!