whateverthing.com

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A few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with Chris Hartjes (aka The Grumpy Programmer) about unfinished hobby projects. His advice got me thinking about how many projects I've got "on the go", and how they often go completely forgotten for months at a time.

I wrote a list of all the ones I can remember. I even included some ones that I "cancelled" or closed down, because I still sometimes think about bringing them back.

When I was finished, the list had 27 items.

This post is about Hobby Project 13. And there's video.

In general, these projects ranged from my many programming side projects, to my unfinished book about Silex, to various blogs I've started, and all the way up to physical projects like the submersible ROV I've started to build.

And my photography. So much photography. That's definitely an ongoing hobby project that I've kept active for quite some time.

A tweet I saw recently recommended keeping screenshots and screencasts of in-development features and projects. This is to help visualize the progress that is being made, which helps to encourage everyone involved.

Another tweet suggested that it might be a good idea to offer a behind-the-scenes peek at hobby projects, as a form of self-encouragement.

So with both of those in mind… allow me to introduce Hobby Project 13:

(caution: there's audio. I may have had too much fun in iMovie.)

(direct link, in case of playback issues)

Inspired by the team at 3v4l.org, this project lets me write and run PHP code with dependencies from Composer.

It's written using Symfony 4 and React, with styling provided by the MaterializeCSS project.

My main reason for writing it was so I could quickly demo libraries I found on Packagist, but it has also morphed into a vehicle for learning more about coding front-end functionality in React.

I don't know if it has a future. I do know that it's been fun to consider that if I build it and release it into the world as a product, Amazon might come along and add PHP support to AWS Lambda, utterly crushing my efforts.

I would applaud that. That would be the best.

Like wearing a hat so that it won't rain.

Anyway, that's a glance at one of my projects. Hope you enjoyed it.