TodayIDid - 2023-04-06

#TID:

I haven’t done a #TodayIDid post in a very long time. I’ve been pretty bogged down with focusing on learning the ‘theory’ and explicit knowledge of JavaScript through my Udemy course. But to be honest, I realized that my lack of #TID posts haven’t solely been because of that reason.

To be completely honest, I haven’t been building actual projects due to my fear of starting and completing a project. Up until now, I wasn’t too clear on the why behind my fear and procrastination. Thankfully, through engaging in conversation with my developer friends, I realized that my fear was stemming through OVERWHELM. The overwhelm that it comes from having to know what my project should look like in terms of design, the functionalities it should carry, the user experience of the entire app, and so on.

Basically, because I was working on these projects myself, I was putting myself in the role of not only a developer, but also a designer and product manager. This ended up in me stressing about details that weren’t necessarily within a web developer’s scope of responsibilities.

So for now, I am going to put a pause on my personal project (including voca-learna) and instead focusing my energy on developing more web apps that are already out there. Examples include: e-commerce site, simple to-do app, social media app with basic functionalities, etc.

This definitely allows me to be more focused on honing my developer skills, because there are tons of already-existing applications that I can refer to for design/CSS/features. I don’t need to figure out the design specs or what functions should be present. I simply need to build it (now, I know that it’s not going to be ‘simple’ at all).

So what is my current project? I am working on building a version of the famous Momentum chrome extension.

The minimum features I would like to include:

Clock that updates
Underneath the clock, a time-appropriate greeting with the user’s name reference
Underneath that, a prompt asking for the main focus of your day
An inspirational quote that is taken from an API
Top right corner - weather & geolocation
Bottom right corner - to-do app functionality

The “bonus” features I would like to include:

A login & logout feature (instead of just typing your name in)
Top left corner having a “bookmark/links” section
When hovering over the quote, displays the author of the quote
Having the option of changing from 24 to 12-hour clock

Now, onwards to what I was able to achieve today:

Setup the initial project through vite
Found a quotes API that I could potentially use (through API Ninjas)
Created a function that utilizes the Date object and setTimeout to update clock regularly (Note: I actually found out that setInterval is probably “cleaner”, and will update the next time I work on the project)
Even deployed it using vercel (so easy!)

I’m currently working on creating the project’s functionalities first prior to rendering the style and CSS - this is to keep me focused on the JavaScript interactivity of the project for now.

Next Steps

Refactor updateClock function to utilize setInterval
Once “main focus of the day” input is entered, rendering a checklist.
Utilize fetch API to render inspirational quote.
Utilize geolocation for location/weather functionality