torus

At this point I've made a habit out of building homebrew tools and languages. Very few of these are purely because I was dissatisfied with off-the-shelf solutions; many of these just exist because I thought it would be fun/educational/challenging to build an X for myself from scratch. I've made - A dynamic programming language, Ink (https://dotink.co), which runs in "production" (for whatever that means for side projects) for around a dozen projects written in it. - A compiler to compile that to JavaScript (https://github.com/thesephist/september) - A bunch of language tooling around that language, like syntax highlighters, editor plugins, code formatters (for example, the code formatter https://github.com/thesephist/inkfmt) - A small UI library (https://github.com/thesephist/torus) - A suite of productivity tools (https://thesephist.com/

My answer your second question actually feeds into the first -- These days developing each tool is 50% taking pieces of tools / libraries I've built before and integrating them together. I've implemented a data store, a form UI, a websocket server, etc. each a few times so as I built up a collection of things I can borrow from other past projects, new projects take less time (or, I have more bandwidth to tackle more complicated projects, new a new tool if need be, etc). I have another blog that goes into my side-project workflows[0] but in gist, I try to make a "usable MVP" for each project within a single chunk of time -- usually a weekend. And from there I try to dogfood it and add changes that I need to keep using it. All this is helped by the fact that, at least with these tools I use, I try to keep a really simple stack. Go or Node.j

Very cool -- looks like the dev (@thesephist) is using Torus, a minimalist front-end framework they themselves are also developing: https://github.com/thesephist/torus Nice showcase of the tech! Now I want to tinker with the Torus framework as well.

6 hours -- I had the idea this morning and started at around 2PM (first commit on GitHub). Finished at around 8PM. The app is all client-side, so I didn't have any backend need. The app renders using a UI rendering library I wrote (https://github.com/thesephist/torus), so I knew the tools I was using inside out, which helped with speed.