November in a nutshell (for me)
From my room — December 2, 2024
Hello World!,
This month was a chaotic one involving learning stuff, building it, and throwing it in the dustbin to start again because rewriting is always a good option, right?
I think this cycle has officially became my definition of work, whether it's starting to learn a system's language for fun, overengineering a portfolio (because why not?), updating everything to the latest NextJS version to watch it break 😅 later.
Things i did (or thought of doing)
- Started learning ZIG (not seriously, only for fun for a week)
- Designed the portfolio
- Building the portfolio
- Migrating Social Media App to Next 15 and to Typescript
- Added customizations to the progress tracking app
- Started to explore React Native
- Getting the second prototype of HexCode completely working!
1. Zigggg
Initially my plan was not to learn zig; It was to either get good at go (which I personally don't enjoy writing) or learn rust (because, of course, the greatest language ever created by humankind—obviously, we are talking about assembly here; rust was made by the gods). But I don't really remember why I chose zig, but it was fun working in it. I solved almost all of the ziglings tutorials; it was way better than I expected, and I think I might stick with it for a while.
2. Designed the portfolio
I'm a terrible designer, as you can see. This is my actual first design that I completed because I hate whatever I design so much that I always end up leaving the thing in the middle and never completing it. This was the first thing that I was very serious about designing, and I think it turned out pretty well considering this was my other design.
Older Design of portfolio
3. Building the portfolio
It was probably easiest. First of all, it's not 100% complete yet (and it never will be). I plan to add some micro interaction and all, but it was easiest because I used the tech stack that I'm pretty familiar with, and building it was fun, but getting it to perform well was tough, like getting everything to work very fast was bad. I had to hack my way around some things, but I think I turned out well and better than I expected it to be, so I'm happy with this at least for now.
4. Migrating Social Media App to Next 15 and to Typescript
I think I migrated before November and tested it, but still, you know, NextJS updates many things and the codmod didnt work for me and I didn't test it well enough, so I had to refactor it afterwards, but that still made the app perform well and fixed some UI parts, which I was delaying because I don't enjoy working with MobileUI, and I also moved it to TypeScript. I wrote a bash command to move every file from.js to.ts and.jsx to.tsx, and I changed tailwind.config.js to tailwind.config.ts. However, I didn’t realize that this would cause issues. After the change, all my styles broke, and I spent a lot of time troubleshooting. It felt like straight-up emotional pain, but after a lot of trial and error, I managed to get everything back on track.
5. Added Customizations to Progress tracking app
I made an app to track my progress for JEE (an engineering entrance exam). I wanted to track todos, no of questions, weak topics, and good questions. I wanted to build something, so instead of trying a pre-built solution, I built it on my own, and I also wanted the questions to be public so that if I found a good tricky question, my friends could also benefit from it, and if they found one, they could also save it, and at the end of the year we would have a library of only tricky questions to practice from.
But I thought of adding customizability to it (because engineering and overengineering are essentially the same thing), and so I did. You can try it out here
It was pretty easy, nothing too complex, just some schema changes, and it worked.
6. Started to explore React Native
So basically, I have taken a break from my main project that I'm working on for some time, and that's why I'm exploring new things this often.
So I dont remember exactly, but I think a month ago React Native's massive update dropped the version 0.76. I was thinking of trying it for a long time, and I did. I was just sitting thinking what to do and saw a YouTube video making an app with React Native, and I thought to make my social media web app into an actual app (which I obviously failed in doing), so I started exploring it, but making a real app would take at least 2-3 weeks of learning first and some toy projects first, so I'm thinking of doing it if I get time because December is going to be rough.
7. Getting the second prototype of HexCode completely working!
This was the thing that I did first, like in the beginning of the month I did this and was so happy that everything was working (not perfectly but still), but after that I started working on the final thing I got so frustrated because of Docker not working on my Linux, that I decided to take almost a month's break from this and wiped my Linux installation 🥲, but I think it was a good decision because I learned a lot of new things in the month.