Iterate, build, improve, and repeat.
Over the last week I gave myself a new goal. It was the first week in a long time that I had some free time after work, and it had been a while since I worked on a side project. When I was younger I would spend endless hours at my computer at night, designing, building, and creating something new. Over the years work has taken up more time, and to be honest I got a bit burnt out. Recently that fire has come back. Maybe it was the constant running around this summer, or the 3 months spent working on my sister’s wedding ceremony. Either way I finally felt that little fire to create something for myself.
The goal was small. Find an open API and build a Vue.js project around it. With most projects I conceive I end up making them too large. Large enough that it takes me a year to finish — if I even finish them, and if I do I don’t even know why I started it. That’s why I set a crucial goal for this project, get it done in under a week. I could have spent countless days designing the perfect interface, thinking up insane interactions, and building it to perfection. Instead I designed in code, built quick and dirty, and treated this project like the charette’s I did at architecture school.
It took me 3 nights of work to complete my project — http://bakersdozen.nyc. A website to listen to all 13 shows of The Phish’s Bakers Dozen run at Madison Square Garden in New York City. For those of you who didn’t know that I am a Phish fan, you do now. Really this project wasn’t about Phish. It was about creating a Vue.js project. Using new technology to build something fun. I found an open API, which happened to be about Phish, and created an audio player. The audio player is built in Vue and will soon be made into a Vue component that any of you can use.
The best part about this tiny project is how much the community loved it. Within the first hour of launching — and putting a link on reddit — it had 1500 unique visits. I was even dubbed an ‘internet genius’ and a ‘hero’, by LiveforLiveMusic.com, but I won’t let that one go to my head.
Honestly it was refreshing to build something for myself, and the fact others enjoyed it made it even better. Although I don’t plan on building out this project to much further, I am onto my next implementing another new technology: GraphQL. Where this will take me who knows. All I can say is that if you get overwhelmed by creating something just start with baby steps. Set a time-limit, build quickly and fix later. Getting something out is the most important part.
