Coding is fun, actually
I've been getting into hobby coding more recently, mainly fiddling with python, html templates and css to generate static websites, which is quite different from what I do in my day job (which is more document writing and attending meetings).
I wanted to write about this for a newsletter I create with my friend, and I wanted to work into the post all the sites I'd browsed around that had inspired me - and a lot of bear blog posts! This great post by software pagan introduced me to marginalia's random search function and I've had a lot of fun with it.
So I decided to put a static site together with a list of links I'd enjoyed recently. As soon as I'd put that together I wanted to make it more dynamic and interesting, so I added some javascript to display a random link when you click a button and some images of the sites to make it more engaging.
Saving all those images got a bit tedious and I remembered seeing this link-peek web component on a code pen newsletter recently. This gathers a preview image and description for the web page for you, using and api link. But this didn't refresh when I updated the link using javascript, so I modified the link-peek.js code a bit myself to get it to work...
By this point I'd ended up with something really messy by disappearing down my coding rabbit hole and it was time to go to bed. Does this happen to all programmers? I feel like whatever I implement I think of a way to make it a bit better, then by the time I get there I start thinking something else entirely would be better.
I didn't end up finishing the site and I don't know when I'll have time to, but I'll share it here when I do - even if it's not any good! I'm trying to keep my hobby coding for the fun of it, and not get too caught up in if it's worthwhile or not. It's just for me! 😄