Success. Well, on par for success.
I’ve archived both PermissionScope and Pantry after finishing the maintenance releases I aimed to complete. I feel great not having those two things on my plate and I’m confident that I can deflect any new changes that might come through until a later date.
I don’t have a concrete plan for the next improvement to That Thing in Swift yet but I’m thinking about a few ideas. First, the community really enjoyed the post about writing your own API clients so I’m considering something along the same lines: a dependency that lots of people use that can be replaced with a small amount of good Swift. I like the idea because it’s different than what most Swift blogs write about - usually just an introduction to using x in Swift - and it requires a bit of creativity. I’d like to experiment with a few other ideas here, maybe some livecoding/video that incorporates actual code snippets that people can copy or follow along with.
Every time I think about finishing the work required for another Treat release, I keep coming back to the sending issue. Part of the reason that it didn’t work out is that there was no compelling reason to send a treat to a friend, even I didn’t do it that often. I’m hesitant to put more work into a part of the project that won’t fix a core issue. I still consider the sending issue every once in a while, I’m looking for a simple hook that could change the reasons for sending to something meaningful which would get me working on all those pieces again.
The last few posts have been new ideas! so let’s review: Pay by Tray is still an interesting idea but unless a restaurant owner who was really psyched about it fell into my lap, I probably won’t go anywhere with it. If that happens in the near future, I’ve already done enough thinking on it to ramp back up quickly enough. Successful projects (of this scale) require deep connections or lots of luck. I don’t have the former so I’ll keep it in the back of my head in case the latter appears.
Watercooler still fixes a problem I have (not enough social interaction while remote contracting) but I came up with a slightly different plan to tackle this for the time being which is probably better for me right now. This issue will probably be more prevalent in the future as remote work is more common and I still think it’s an interesting problem to solve (in an interesting way, not necessarily this one). In the meantime, you can sort of force this by just jumping on a random blab when you’re bored. It seems like most of the people there are in various states of boredom anyway.
I briefly looked into the tech I would need to build a stream of conversations from your friends on Twitter again. I came back to the idea after a while because it’s sticking in my head like a thing that might be a fun way to see what’s going on just outside of your social circle. And it seems like a thing that could be popular. I took a stab at it with pure js the other day but it looks like I will have to do some sort of oauth implementation which is more complicated than I wanted to get into. I then jumped over to Go to see if I could figure out the API calls needed to discover conversations in the first place but I ended up not wanting to spend a couple hours just getting back up to speed with Go. If I’m only interested in proving that it’s an interesting idea at the moment, I might as well do a quick swift implementation on the phone or iPad since that will be the least language friction (but UI still required).
I think I covered this before, but I’ll reiterate that ideas are super cheap and saying “No” (or just letting things die in this case) is not something that I’m concerned about. I like looking back on all this regardless of success.