Am I doing it anyway? YES, for some reason

I regret to announce that I’ve given into my intrusive thoughts and am building a to-do list app.

– is it needed? indubitably not
– is it innovative? no, it’s a to-do list
– do I have time to do it? barely
– am I doing it anyway? YES, for some reason

It’s classic developer bullshit, I’m afraid. There are already a million and one to-do list apps, all with their own little niggles, and I’d love to say that this one will be something new and exciting. But honestly, this is just an excuse to wield my UX and dev powers unwisely, feed my Not Invented Here goblin and play with some new tech.

It gives me a reason to try out Remix, which is a nice change after a few NextJS projects. I’m delving into Turso for the database and Drizzle as the ORM, with enough complexity that I’m even learning some SQL.

Remix has a whole bunch of interesting authorisation libraries. I’m testing out front- and back-end validation libraries, and digging more deeply into the excellent Shadcn and Radix UI libraries.

The blessing and curse of modern dev is that there’s a never-ending list of new toys to play with, new things to learn. I’ve never really thought of myself as a full-stack developer, but there’s something pretty cool about being able to whip up an entire app from front-end to back-end to database to deployment — it reminds me of the feeling when I learned about servers and FTP back in college and realised that you could just… put stuff on the internet? without having to ask? and anyone can see it?

The internet has changed over the last ten years, and large chunks are either matured into corporate blandness or so ad-infested as to be unusable — but I love the fact that you can still have an idea, build an app or whatever and just put it out there. So while that lasts, I’m going to make the most of it.

Now to tick off “write LinkedIn post” on my very own to-do list… after I’ve built the “tick off” button. And agonised over the icon. And hooked it up to the database 🫠