Earlier this month, I wrote an article titled “ My Story as a Homeless Developer ”. I received a ton of support from the community and connected with a lot of people who had experienced similar struggles before and also people who were going through those struggles currently. It was a great experience! I felt relieved to get my story out there and inspired to keep writing. I also was extremely motivated to keep growing as a developer.
Soon after publishing that article, I started making greater strides towards financial stability. I’m still figuring it out and I will get there but hope has been restored. The primary reason that article got as many views as it did, so quickly, is because of Hacker News . At the time of writing this, Hacker News accounted for 33k of the 70k views. Thirty-three thousand individuals that visit that site clicked on my post where I had shared the article and decided to read it.
“man holding brown strawhat standing on top of rock” by lucas wesney on Unsplash
The first thing I learned is that not everyone will shun you for sharing your story. A lot of users who visit Hacker News provided a ton of support. My LinkedIn profile filled up with kind wishes and advice. A few days after publishing the article, after the buzz had died down, I decided to be proactive in improving my skills and my portfolio. I had a ton of repositories in a variety of languages using many different frameworks and tools. The thing I was missing, was a solid example of an application that goes beyond the difficulty of those experiments. I needed to face a number of challenges to grow. Charging at these problems head-on would give me an idea of what I knew, what I didn’t know and what I needed to know.
So after a little bit of brainstorming, I decided to write a Hacker News clone. It seemed like a simple enough goal. The requirements were well-defined and I had done most of this before (or so I thought). I simply lacked the one portfolio piece that would put a lot of my skills into a single, easy-to-access, well written, nicely documented, completely tested, project. Some of those things aren’t currently there but I digress. I needed more of a challenge though, or so I thought. So I decided to use a language that I had just discovered.
That language is called Crystal . It’s a neat language that’s fairly new. It’s fast and it looks like Ruby. It’s statically-typed, general-purpose and open source. A new language, however, was not enough. It was similar to other languages I had used in the past. So, I wanted to include more functionality in the clone, that I considered useful because I thought that the clone, simply, was too easy.
Crystal
Fast as C, slick as Ruby crystal-lang.org
This brings me to the real *first* thing that I learned.
Don’t aim *too* high, atfirstI’m not saying you shouldn’t set goals that challenge you. You totally should aim for the stars, dream big and act on those dreams in an even bigger way. What I’m referring to, is design. To be more specific, like in my case, I learned that I could have benefited by splitting big goals into smaller goals. It’s a lesson I keep learning over and over and in different ways. If your problem is too big, split it up. If your codebase is cluttered, split it up (where it makes sense). If you are adding a ton of unrelated code, don’t have a single ‘commit’ with a vague ‘commit message’. I cannot stress how important it is to turn a challenge into smaller attainable challenges. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all philosophy to carry but it works when applied correctly.
“men walking on stairs” by John Moeses Bauan on Unsplash
In my case, I was facing new problems that I hadn’t solved before. I had used Crystal only for an application that was slightly more complicated than the “Hello, world!” tradition of programs. It was a new language and to make things harder, it was statically-typed and compiled. I had primarily been working with languages like python, Lua, and php before. The language was the first obstacle.
The second obstacle was the framework. Crystal, being a newer language, had less established frameworks and documentation for those frameworks. I decided to use Kemal for my clone. It had functionality that was self-explanatory because of my experience with other frameworks. Some things weren’t so easy to figure out. It was difficult to find help with some issues in places where I’d normally look, such as Stack Overflow. In some cases, I actually had to dig through the source. To this day, after using it for many months professionally, I had never looked at any source of Flask , for example. For this project, I found myself looking at the source of an unfamiliar framework in an unfamiliar language.
The third and most challenging obstacle, which will be addressed better as time goes on, is the specific goals I had set for this project. To make my Hacker News clone more useful, I decided to add some functionality that I thought would be useful. You see, I had previous experience posting on Hacker News. I would link to things like projects of mine and get the analytical data that GitHub provides. I could link to a GitHub Page and write some functionality to track things such as views and activity on the site and in some cases, I even did that. But what about when your post was a question and didn’t link to anything external?
So with those thoughts in mind, I decided that my clone would give at *least* the view/click count for every post. I thought it would be awesome to challenge myself a bit more and make it so that this data is updated for users, live! How exciting! The “live” part was what turned this into a real challenge. It’s something that I am working on still. The project itself, at the time of this writing, is a rough proof-of-concept. It implements every feature that I decided to put into the “first-release bucket”. Besides updating views and click counts, live, for posts, I decided to make it so that comments on posts show up as they happen. I got it done but I learned that if I had set my goals a little bit lower and distributed them better in my todo-list, I could have written something better and skipped a step.
Releasing early-and-often though, as I seem to want to follow these days, is good. As quickly as I could, I implemented the features. You could log in, submit a post, sort the posts based on filters, interact with other users via comments, view profiles, and so on…
The fourth thing I learned is that migrations, models, views, API controllers, CSS styli