There’s a side project that I’ve had in my head literally for years. It will solve a minor annoyance I have that comes up a couple of times per year, and an extremely basic version should be quite quick to put together. Even though I’m snowed under with work, one of the annual events that the project will help with is coming up very quickly, so I’m going to get a rough version online to use, with my family, and see what works and what doesn’t. I also intend to blog about the process, and track the time spent on the project.
The nature of the project will be kept secret for a while.
Why now, After so many Years?
TL;DR: I think that web development has progressed to a point that I can get a lot of value out of the project for a reasonable amount of work.
For years this was “the project that I would learn Rails with,” back when Rails was the cool kid on the block. Now PHP, which I’ve worked with for years, has grown up and I don’t feel the same need to learn Rails. This is a chance to try some modern PHP techniques that are difficult to push into legacy projects, in an environment where I’m the one who will suffer if I screw up.
There’s a heavy mobile component, so I plan to use a Responsive design, which I haven’t gone all-in on before, and I recently learned a bunch of performance tricks, so stay tuned for some greased lightning.
SASS, and Grunt build routines for SASS, Grunt, and images have made their way into legacy projects but I’ve never started a project with these in place, and I’m excited to see how it goes.
Finally, by building on the old-fashioned LAMP stack I can host the project on existing servers at no additional cost so the only cost will be my time.
Source, Open and Closed
This unlike a couple of other projects, this one will be largely closed-source. I think it may be a viable business so I intend to find out before giving it away for free. This means I got to have adventures in setting up a Git server instead of relying on GitHub.
I will be sharing things that are not core to the business such as interesting techniques, and maybe my Gruntfile. If the project doesn’t become a business, I may release the source, only time will tell.