Being distracted building tooling and frameworks is one of the harder things I find with personal projects.
In paid $work, there is a) an imposed direction and usually a schedule from a customer b) often a team of people to distribute work to, and to help keep one disciplined.
Example: I'm writing a VST synthesizer, virtual instrument, as a personal project in my time off between jobs. Maybe I'll make it commercial someday, not sure. I became increasingly frustrated with the half-assed portable GUI toolkit bundled with the VST3 SDK ("VSTGUI"). There's a complete lack of decent cross platform UI options that will work in this context (QT won't do it here, for reasons.)
I realized that there's already a cross platform UI option with millions of man hours put into it: the web. So I have spent the last three or four weeks writing a bridge to embed Edge-Chromium, WebKit, etc. Have that working on Win32, at least (still have to do the work for Linux & Mac, but ok).
Then on to actually making the UI in this platform. Now I'm learning npm, webpack, TypeScript.
Need a nice little HTML/CSS knob for my UI. Most are bundled in a giant framework I don't want. Oh, here's one in pure JS. But, hm. I think I'll refactor this into Typescript. Now it's forked, just for me.
Ok, well, yes I have that mostly working. Some warts, but basically is very similar to the "native" (VSTGUI) UI I had before. But now I want to write a graphical envelope editor. Off to learn HTML Canvas drawing.
Many parts of this whole process could themselves be spun off into separate projects, that I could spend years maintaining, on their own.
And so it goes. The Yak is pretty shaved at this point.
In paid $work, there is a) an imposed direction and usually a schedule from a customer b) often a team of people to distribute work to, and to help keep one disciplined.
Example: I'm writing a VST synthesizer, virtual instrument, as a personal project in my time off between jobs. Maybe I'll make it commercial someday, not sure. I became increasingly frustrated with the half-assed portable GUI toolkit bundled with the VST3 SDK ("VSTGUI"). There's a complete lack of decent cross platform UI options that will work in this context (QT won't do it here, for reasons.)
I realized that there's already a cross platform UI option with millions of man hours put into it: the web. So I have spent the last three or four weeks writing a bridge to embed Edge-Chromium, WebKit, etc. Have that working on Win32, at least (still have to do the work for Linux & Mac, but ok).
Then on to actually making the UI in this platform. Now I'm learning npm, webpack, TypeScript.
Need a nice little HTML/CSS knob for my UI. Most are bundled in a giant framework I don't want. Oh, here's one in pure JS. But, hm. I think I'll refactor this into Typescript. Now it's forked, just for me.
Ok, well, yes I have that mostly working. Some warts, but basically is very similar to the "native" (VSTGUI) UI I had before. But now I want to write a graphical envelope editor. Off to learn HTML Canvas drawing.
Many parts of this whole process could themselves be spun off into separate projects, that I could spend years maintaining, on their own.
And so it goes. The Yak is pretty shaved at this point.