Pete's Log: Code That Fits
Entry #2763, (Meta)(posted when I was 46 years old.)
Happy Father's Day to all the Dad's out there, especially my own! I got to spend part of the day working on my esgeroth.org rewrite and I am at a point where I feel like I just need to stream of consciousness
It's been almost five years since I added a web interface for uploading pictures. I've made tremendous use of it, and have of course thought of many ways I'd like it to be improved. And then there are the old picture galleries. Way way back when, I had a PHP photo gallery app of some sort that lived at /pictures. At some point it stopped working and then in 2007, Brian helped me set up a different gallery app that lived at /gallery. It too stopped working quite a while ago. I still have all those pictures, but they're not online at the moment. Should they be? Maybe. At least some of them. And I've been wanting the ability to create new albums. So with image upload being one of the big remaining features missing in my esgeroth.org rewrite, and with my trust of third party PHP gallery apps low, I have started pondering what it would look like if I had my own gallery code integrated into esgeroth.org. The most immediately obvious benefit is it could use the same accounts, which would be handy. So that's a big chunk looming over me that I haven't tackled yet.
Today has been a lot of refactoring. The goal of this whole endeavor is to have something modern and testable but above that is the goal that this code base should fit me. Over the decades it's been fun to add new features to this site, and if it doesn't continue to be fun, then I took a wrong turn somewhere. My AI misadventure did leave me with more scenarios I could look at and compare which sparked joy and which did not. So I have some new philosophies in place and then took the time to apply them across the entire code base. The refactor is nearly done but since there were some significant structural changes, I have almost 50 unit tests failing now. So we'll have to get that part of the house back in order next.
But there's some cool stuff coming along. Like a notifications system. And it's starting to feel right. It's sparking joy. Now I just have to finish it.