2024-10-25

Beginnings

1 - Goals of the project.

The goal of the project is to get back in the habit of learning new things—not just learning but also attempting to learn in public. Lately, I’ve been in a rut, but when I started looking into Rails 8, I started to feel excitement about programming I haven’t felt in forever. So, I am going to be putting out my plans, hopefully in a way that will help keep me accountable and also help someone else learn something, too.

There are several things I want to expand my knowledge on. One thing is that javascript has become fairly complex, and also javascript api’s are becoming more unified. So I am going to be trying to write this application using vanilla javascript mostly, but also trying to use Rails’ turbojs features.

[[Rails 8]] specifically [[Turbo]], [[ActionCable]] and the [[postgres]] [[ActiveJob]] adapters.
[[Nix]] and [[Flakes]] so that I can easily setup and teardown [[development environments]].
[[Contnuous Integration]] / [[Continuous Deployment]] technologies using github actions and nix to build [[containers]].
I want to try [[podman]] over [[docker]]
I want to explore [[AI]] tools to speed up my process. ([[Cursor]], [[ChatGPT]], etc..)
After watching [[railsconf 2024]] I am excited to try out [[Playwright]] for testing.

I always learn better by building some sort of tool, over the years I have started and stopped many projects. This time inorder to follow through I am building a tool that I will use as I continue to learn, iteratively adding features as I learn new things or discover different needs.
The first application will be a pomodoro timer, and a task list, I already have a few ideas for how I want to differentiate this from other pomodoro timers. I also want to use this to collect data on my productivity so that I can make data driven decisions on how I can improve my productivity.

The first thing I did was configure my development machine with [[Nix]] and [[Flakes]]. My goal here is to have a reproducible development environment that is easy to setup and tear down. I also want to learn how to write [[flakes]] so that I can share configurations with others.
Around the same time I began playing with using scaffolding to learn turbojs, I now have a working todolist application but it doesn’t have user specific tasks yet, it’s just one list for all users. This is something I want to add next as I have already tried out rails 8 authentication generato2r.
After watching https://youtube.com/watch?v=loTaZAkIZP0 I found out about [[Playwright]] and wrote some feature specs for the todolist application.