Hello,
Welcome to this week’s episode of “git init; abandoned innit?”
As you may know, I send these newsletters to share lessons I learnt from building side projects — ‘The App’, in this case.
Always course-correct
As Software Engineers, we are highly susceptible to the dangers of premature optimisations and over-engineering. I almost fell for it this week.
My goal for the week (and the week before) was to complete a POC — data extraction from LinkedIn. Last week, I quickly appreciated React and the problems it solves. Not to mention TypeScript, the icing on the cake.
Because of this, I set out to build a template for creating Chrome extensions using React and TypeScript. We hit a brick wall on Sunday while trying to build a poor man’s transpiler.
Anyway, this template was a nice-to-have; I could have achieved my goal without it. However, I spent hours working on scaling over that brick wall this week. Then I paused and asked myself, “What in God’s name are you doing? Will this bring you closer to achieving your goal?” The answer was a resounding ‘No!’
I stashed my progress and switched to my POC’s repo.
Remember that being busy or pushing commits is not always the same as being productive; hitting your goals is being productive.
Until next Friday, stay on course, and don't even think about abandoning that pet project. 😉
Osahon.
PS: You can contribute to the React + TypeScript Chrome extension template here: https://github.com/oosahon/chrome-extension-react-ts-template