Leon Mika

I did a bit of a clean-up of my projects folder yesterday, clearing out all the ideas that never made it off the ground. I’d figured it’d be good to write a few words about each one before erasing them from my hard drive for good.

I suppose the healthiest thing to do would be to just let them go. But what can I say? Should a time come in the future where I wish to revisit them, it’d be better to have something written down than not. It wouldn’t be the first time I wished this was so.

Anyway, here are the ones that were removed today. I don’t have dates of when these were made or abandoned, but it’s likely somewhere between 2022 and 2024.

Interlaced

This was an idea for a YouTube client¹ that would’ve used YouTube’s RSS feeds to track subscriptions. The idea came about during a time when I got frustrated with YouTube’s ads. I think it was an election year and I was seeing some distasteful political ads that really turned me off. This would’ve been a mobile app, most likely built using Flutter, and possibly with a server component to get this working with Chromecast, although I had no idea how that would work.

This never got beyond the UI mock-up stage, mainly because the prospect of working on something this large seemed daunting. Probably just as well, as YouTube solved the ads problem for me, with the release of YouTube Premium.

Red Crest

I thought I could build my own blogging engine and this is probably the closest I got (well, in recent years). This project began as an alternative frontend for Dave Winer’s Drummer, rendering posts that would be saved in OPML. But it eventually grew into something of it’s own with the introduction of authoring features.

I got pretty far on that front, allowing draft posts and possibly even scheduled posts (or at least the mechanics for scheduled posts). One feature I did like was the ability to make private posts. These would be interleaved with the public ones once I logged in, giving me something of a hybrid between a blogging CMS and a private journal. It was also possible to get these posts via a private RSS feed. I haven’t really seen a CMS do something quite like this. I know of some that allow posts to be visible to certain cohorts of readers, but nothing for just the blog author.

In the end, it all got a bit much. I started preparing the screen for uploading and managing media, I decided it wasn’t worth the effort. After all, there were so many other blogging CMS’s already out there that did 90% of what I wanted.

Reno

As in “Renovation”. Not much to say about this one, other than it being an attempt to make a Pipe Dreams clone. I think I was exploring a Go-based game library and I wanted to build something relatively simple. This didn’t really go any further that what you see here.

SLog

Short for “Structured Log”. This was a tool for reading JSON log messages, like the ones produce by zerolog. It’s always difficult to read these in a regular text editor, and to be able to list them in a table made sense to me. This one was built for the terminal but I did make a few other attempts building something for this; one using a web-based GUI tool, and another as a native MacOS app. None of these went very far — turns out there’s a lot of tedious code involved — but this version was probably the furthest along before I stopped work.

Despite appearing on this list, I think I’ll keep this one around. The coding might be tedious, but I still have need something like this, and spending the time to build this properly might be worth it one day.

Miscellany

Here are all the others that didn’t even get to the point that warranted a screenshot or a paragraph of text:

• s3-browse: a TUI tool for browsing S3 buckets. This didn’t go beyond simply listing the files of a directory.
• scorepeer: An attempt to make a collection of online score-cards much like the Finska one I built.
• withenv: Preconfigure the environment for a command with the values of an .env file (there must be something out there that does this already).
• About 3 aborted attempts to make a wiki-style site using Hugo (one called “Techknow Space” which I though was pretty cleaver).

I’m sure there’ll be more projects down the line that would receive the same treatment as these, so expect similar posts in the future.