It seems a very long time since I’ve been coding at home.
Travel, a flaky hard drive, a change of role at work are among the reasons I just haven’t felt like doing any.
Also, I was doing a big rewrite of Foldatry, and while before travelling I got the new bits to the proof of concept I now have the relative drudge of merging the trial code into the main code.
But I now have a new desk. which gives me space to setup the backup drives for doing consolidating, so that’s impetus for getting on with it.
Which means I now face the same situation I had when I made my first Techocodger video – i.e. that of coming back to code after a break, with a general idea of what I had planned to do, and having to dive back into the details.
At the time, I thought: this will be a rare situation so I should make the video now even if its awful (and it is).
If anything, this time it’s even worse as I had a major reworking in train, and that was after having just done a wholesale rebranding process.
It’s odd, that while I like coding outside of work, having no-one else to please or answer to, it seems that on the other hand the spending of my own time is hard to sell to myself.
Of course, the reason I’ve written this program is to do things – things that I couldn’t find any other software to do for me.
So as I make use of it – and the current version on GitLab is certainly functional – I see ways that I want it to do more for me – and that gives me the urge to get back into the code to improve it.
Right now, I have four hard drives on the desk and plugged into the USB3 hub and it feels like a kind of magic having Foldatry to find the redundancies among the gigabytes and terabytes and delete them for me. Enough to make me thank past me for bothering to get into coding at home again.
But of course, sorting out bazillions of files and folders has lots of tricky bits, so already I’m seeing improvements I want to make.
Some of that is easy.
For example, today I copied a huge folder from one drive to another, and then tasked Foldatry with proving that the copy was perfect and to delete the source. Surely I could add the initial copy action into Foldatry so it can do the whole job as one task?
But I can also see a feature to add, that combines the logic of the folder matching with that of the file matching, to avoid the time-wasting of the latter – because it assumes file content hashing to detect files that are the same regardless of filename or folder location.
While in many ways, having an existing program now makes it easier to add features to it – rather than write a whole new tool – the converse problem is working out how to fit the new idea into the existing structure. Part of that challenge is at the code level, but part is also about where in the GUI the feature should be placed.
So I guess that’s my new cycle now: use, take notes for a feature, sketch feature, implement feature, repeat. Drat, now that really does feel like work, rather than a home hobby.
Codgercoder 