Motivation
A while ago I started a large-scale project that I intended to be able to use myself to manage both my coding projects & university assignments. This project was called devpad and I spent days designing it to be an all encompassing one-stop solution 3 main problems
- I wouldn't stay on track with my side projects
- I would forget important things (mostly for university)
- I would leave a todo in my codebase and never come back to it
Original Idea
devpad was designed to help me with these 3 main things, and I had designed the whole system around this idea of it being able to integrate with my github account, search through every project for @todo or TODO: in the code base and automatically make & link up 'tasks' that I could then track as if they were jira tickets. I probably spent about 6 months making both a todo list application with categories, start/end dates, a whole module system for adding things to these tasks; and a project organiser where I could create goals and milestones, write specification for the project, see a history of updates I had made to the project and tasks linked to the project. I had gotten this far, and completely forgotten about the original idea of having a system that would search through my code.
Moving Forward
Now that I've spent some time away from devpad to focus on some other side projects, work, and university, I think it's a good time to revisit the project but with a more mature, stream-lined focused approach to it. I want to start off by making a tool that I can embed anywhere that will take a list of existing 'tasks', and then given a codebase go through it and identify moved tasks, new tasks, and deleted tasks. This is quite a complex program but I think it's doable. Once I've got it working in one language, I want to use it as a way for me to learn other languages, such that I'll rewrite the program in other languages, and then describe my experiences with the language in further blog posts. I think this is a good, practical way for me to learn new languages. I want to start learning Rust, polish up my knowledge of C++, try out Kotlin and maybe a LISP-based language as well.