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Comment by michaelbuckbee

1 day ago

It it reminds me of a lot of friends who wanted to "start blogging" and their first step was writing a new static site system from scratch.

28 comments

michaelbuckbee

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throw10920  15 hours ago

Or friends who want to "make a game" and their first step is writing game engine from scratch.

I wouldn't be surprised if programmers had, collectively, written more game engines than actual games.

  • embedding-shape  9 hours ago

    > I wouldn't be surprised if programmers had, collectively, written more game engines than actual games.

    Tailored to web developers, there definitively are more half-finished frameworks sitting on people's disks than finished web applications, I'm sure my ratio is pretty close to 1/1 over the years.

  • opan  5 hours ago

    I'd much prefer people do this than pump out more poorly-running Unity or UE games.

  • bitwize  14 hours ago

    Oh, that's exactly what I do. My rule is: one game, one engine. It's based on whatever the OS provides of course, or an abstraction layer like SDL, but everything above that is my own, tailored specifically to the game at hand.

debesyla  12 hours ago

Or when I wanted to write a novel and went into world-building fantasy enciclopedia for two years... I didn't even pass the page 2 of the novel, lol. Now it's all forgotten.

eichin  20 hours ago

yeah, part of my current writing push was made more successful by two things:

* I am not allowed to use a blogging system I wrote. (Really, I've written three or four at this point and need to stop, and there are plenty of existing systems that still align with my idiosyncratic constraints.)

* The blog must not have any meta content about blog tooling.

(I cheated a little on the latter by having an extra "site" blog for that - which lets me get the words out but doesn't "count" for the writing goal. A useful outlet, but it meant an extra month or so before "real writing" outnumbered meta writing :-)

embedding-shape  21 hours ago

But how am I supposed to be productive writing blogposts unless I can copy my favorite Clojure templating library into Nix first, so I can have completely statically and reproducible blog posts building from markdown together with the nicest type of templating?

cortesoft  1 day ago

I think it is great to combine two personal projects into one!

For me, I can't learn anything unless I actually have a purpose for it. So if I wanted to learn how to write a static site system, I would also need to think of a reason I need one!

  • em-bee  16 hours ago

    one of my goals is to work on the server platform that i am using for my websites. i want to write a blog, but i am using that desire to push myself to work on the platform, so i need to complete that blog interface first.

egeozcan  13 hours ago

I think writing a static site generator was the first moment I felt like I may be serious about this programming thing.

Those losers who still need Perl on their servers better be ready for a mind explosion

...thought, me back in (too lazy to look up which year it was). I probably published like two things with it, spent (what felt like) a million person hours on it, just to abandon it and use Textpattern.