A year of makeall.dev

It’s been a year since I had the idea to start makeall.dev. A software craftsmanship blog to collect my development and learning projects.

I was juggling with many things at the time and it felt like I wasn’t able to spend time on things I love. I needed a semi-structured way to create a path which allows me to try new things but doesn’t let me get lost. The answer was this blog where I started documenting things I learned or created.

At first the process was simple. I had a list of ideas about small projects or experiments. I pick one of them and write relevant code with some kind of demo which I can embed in a webpage as a live app or recording. Then I write some commentary around it in a very informal way. If it was worthy of publishing then I write a title, summary, tags and create a post for makeall.dev. Otherwise it goes in one of many lost github repositories.

The Articles in the start were very random because I have been maintaining that list for a long time. I wrote a lot of C and learned LISP and Erlang. For demo purposes though a lot ended up having some python, JavaScript and Go. Initial plan was to have three basic categories of posts:

  • Article: about any topic where code is providing the further explanation
  • HowTos: Simple tutorial and setup notes
  • Miniz: Independent small projects

As per the plan I experimented with a lot of different topics:

Not everything was about software development and technology. I did learn a lot and experimented with other things:

As a result makeall.dev expanded a lot and now have a lot of branches:

  • Main blog, which still true to the original idea
  • Study, interview preparation stuff and other core computer science concepts
  • Trading, everything related to finance
  • Mapps, a collection of micro-Applications
  • Launch, product building and launch toolkit
  • Code, collection of arbitrary codes and experiments

A lot of projects evolved into stand alone applications as well.

  • RecipeGrab: Android application to capture recipes from food blogs
  • QuickSurf: Flutter application to get the best of internet in fewer taps
  • .gitignore Generator: ReactJS application to generate .gitignore file for your project
  • ImageProcessor: Web assembly application for image processing powered by imagemagick
  • Launchpad: Product building and launching toolkit for makers
  • Gleaner: NoCode platform to create in-app user feedback widgets for web applications

Rest is hiding somewhere in the heaps of github repositories I created.

Last year was very eventful in both professional and personal fronts.

  • I moved two times
  • took three vacations
  • spent half of the year as consultant and half on independent projects
  • spent a considerable amount of time on non-software related activities
  • Lost almost fifteen pounds and have been in the best shape of my life.

It was hectic at first but I am proud of myself on how I handled my mental health. It was a good year and went better than I had planned. Here to another great one.