The Six Beasts
Now and again I find myself thinking about problems that I was never truly able to solve or projects I never got to realize. Some of them are from early on in my career, when I didn’t have enough knowledge or skill to execute a solution as I would have liked to, or the estimated time and effort wasn’t worth it, but I still wanted to make something to solve The Problem At Hand. As the years passed, the thing became more than a task at my day job meant for someone else to use; it became a personal challenge that I would enjoy conquering, even if no one else ever used it. At the very least I would definitely learn something along the way. I would craft it, my way, meeting my specs and satisfaction (or amusement). No proposals, approvals, stories, sprints, code freezes, pull requests… just creating on my own.
I dub thee The Six Beasts. These are ideas/problems/projects that have become professional mental baggage to some extent. I think about them from time to time and I believe I would feel some degree of catharsis if they were out of my head. Things I learn years later re-awaken memories of my past experience long after the project is over or I’ve left the job. “Geez”, I’ll say to myself, “If only I knew about (some pattern, technology or framework) back then, I could just crank out that thing I wanted to make.”
On a related note, I often see posts from students or folks just starting to program, who find themselves in “tutorial hell” and don’t know what Big Meaty Project to work on to really cut their chops. The hard way is to spend 16 years as a developer to see what is out there (or not) in terms of software solutions to business (or people) problems.
So here we go:
- Shift work scheduler
- Liber Primus solver
- Team focused task manager
- Word Ace clone
- Web based Turing’s World
- Project business intelligence
Each one of these has a story to them, I’ll go into each one as they come up. Might not be anytime soon though.
There are a few more ideas that are honorable mentions, but these for me are the core things that I could work on to sharpen my skill and lay to rest some long-spinning plates in my head. I don’t know what the tech stack will be; more research is needed from which I will definitely learn about the various options. Maybe I’ll pick some tool or framework I’ve never touched before and learn how to use it whilst slaying a beast or two. Won’t that be fun?