7 ms·

Good thing I didn't keep procrastinating, ha! My project is a Phoenix app, and the thing that's been stalling me lately is that the feature I'm working on seem

Good thing I didn't keep procrastinating, ha! My project is a Phoenix app, and the thing that's been stalling me lately is that the feature I'm working on seemed like a good candidate to be built with Liveview, which I have almost no experience with. The screen in question is where a user can put together a routine from their exercises (it's an app for organizing your practice routine for a musical instrument). I want users to be able to drag and drop the exercises they add to a routine into their preferred order. So I spent my hour and change today reading through the 4th chapter of the LiveView book and then hooked up a live route to a page in my app. As of right now it's not even close to done, but I do have a basic scaffold in place now, and I started putting together a basic HTML page in another file to experiment with the look and feel of the thing. I'm not much of a frontend guy so another stumbling block has just been trying to piece together things that look halfway decent. Phoenix 1.7 ships with Tailwind so I've also been trying to wrap my head around that. It wasn't all that much really, but I'm one step further along, and hopefully have a little less friction for the next session. So far, I've clocked 12 hours on the project, with a goal of putting in 162 hours over the next few months (to match the amount of time I spent playing Factorio last year). 12 hours doesn't feel like that much to me, but I've learned a good amount about Phoenix so far. A lot of the first few hours was spent learning about Ecto (the main Elixir/Phoenix database framework). Anyway, it's often frustrating - I want to be at the point where I can just sit down with an idea and make it happen. But it does feel good to "put the reps in," and hopefully the time I'm investing will pay off in a more accessible set of skills.

samsquire 4y ago
Wow - that sounds really interesting. Well done for persevering :-) I think LiveView is a really interesting idea and can be extremely powerful to building responsive applications. I've always wondered how LiveView scales when you add a load balancer to the mix and what you need to do to cause it to work at scale. I'm not much of a frontend (css/html) person either! I just set myself a task and work until it's done, it's not part of an overreaching project but sometimes they do join up together and I merge the work together.
- agentwiggles 4y ago
  Scaling doesn't seem likely to be a major concern in my case, although it's definitely worth thinking about. I do eventually plan to release this thing to the public though. I guess if I end up with enough users to need to worry about any kind of scale, that would be a good problem to have!
- agentwiggles 4y ago
  > I just set myself a task and work until it's done, it's not part of an overreaching project I wanted to add something in response to this bit - I have, for most of my dev career, tended to avoid doing big projects when I'm playing around on the side. I have, for example, completed one year of Advent of Code, done quite a few puzzles from other years, and done lots of little one-off things like that. The current project has been interesting because it's forcing me to take a bigger picture view and grapple with the difficulties of integrating lots of different modules together into something cohesive. As I get closer to releasing something, I'll also have to figure out some things I've never done before - how to accept payments, set up an LLC, and so on and so forth. I've been repeatedly telling myself that even if I never have a single paying user (well, besides myself), that the knowledge I gain by going from an empty text file to an actual "business entity" capable of accepting a payment for a service will be worth a lot as I continue my career. Truly "full stack", you could say.
  - samsquire 4y ago
    > I wanted to add something in response to this bit - I have, for most of my dev career, tended to avoid doing big projects when I'm playing around on the side. I have, for example, completed one year of Advent of Code, done quite a few puzzles from other years, and done lots of little one-off things like that. Whenever I set myself a large project and prepare to undertake something large, my motivation to work on it changes and I start wanting to do other things. But when I just commit to do a small task of part of something large I feel I can do anything I want. I just need to get the small task done. You can scale a mountain doing a little part at a time.

samsquire 4y ago

Wow - that sounds really interesting. Well done for persevering :-) I think LiveView is a really interesting idea and can be extremely powerful to building responsive applications. I've always wondered how LiveView scales when you add a load balancer to the mix and what you need to do to cause it to work at scale. I'm not much of a frontend (css/html) person either! I just set myself a task and work until it's done, it's not part of an overreaching project but sometimes they do join up together and I merge the work together.

agentwiggles 4y ago
Scaling doesn't seem likely to be a major concern in my case, although it's definitely worth thinking about. I do eventually plan to release this thing to the public though. I guess if I end up with enough users to need to worry about any kind of scale, that would be a good problem to have!
agentwiggles 4y ago
> I just set myself a task and work until it's done, it's not part of an overreaching project I wanted to add something in response to this bit - I have, for most of my dev career, tended to avoid doing big projects when I'm playing around on the side. I have, for example, completed one year of Advent of Code, done quite a few puzzles from other years, and done lots of little one-off things like that. The current project has been interesting because it's forcing me to take a bigger picture view and grapple with the difficulties of integrating lots of different modules together into something cohesive. As I get closer to releasing something, I'll also have to figure out some things I've never done before - how to accept payments, set up an LLC, and so on and so forth. I've been repeatedly telling myself that even if I never have a single paying user (well, besides myself), that the knowledge I gain by going from an empty text file to an actual "business entity" capable of accepting a payment for a service will be worth a lot as I continue my career. Truly "full stack", you could say.
- samsquire 4y ago
  > I wanted to add something in response to this bit - I have, for most of my dev career, tended to avoid doing big projects when I'm playing around on the side. I have, for example, completed one year of Advent of Code, done quite a few puzzles from other years, and done lots of little one-off things like that. Whenever I set myself a large project and prepare to undertake something large, my motivation to work on it changes and I start wanting to do other things. But when I just commit to do a small task of part of something large I feel I can do anything I want. I just need to get the small task done. You can scale a mountain doing a little part at a time.