Thomas Cannon

Inspired by Lucian’s post, I finally setup code quality for the first Practical Computer app.

This whole process was definitely borderline “do it right, or do it twice.” I wish I’d solved this a bit sooner. I knew it was necessary, but had kept pushing it back because the app isn’t even close to being live yet. But this line from Lucian’s post changed my opinion:

Side projects developed while having a full-time job have a unique characteristic worth noting. The time dedicated to working on the side project is not continuous. For instance, you may work on it for 1-2 hours on Saturday, and the next opportunity to work on it may only arise a week later.

It is then essential to make the code quality built-in and use as much automation as possible.

That’s a very strong argument, and one I hadn’t heard yet. Of course, since I delayed, it caused the past 3 work sessions to be solely about fixing up the repo. But the upside is now I have all the code ready for the next project. And speaking of that, here’s a gist of my customized set of Rubocop & CircleCI configuration. I hope it helps!

I made a few technical differences than Lucian:

• I trimmed down the Rubocops used. This gives me a balance of expressiveness & the benefits of a linter
• I chose CircleCI because it’s what I’ve been using for years and it’s Fine™️. Plus it has the distinct advantage of SSH access to debug jobs, and job reporters
• I’m using Bun, so relying on Dependabot for my JS dependencies
• I’m using Code Climate for maintainability monitoring

👋 I’m stuck waiting on laundry to finish, so carving out some time for an announcement!

I’ve been wanting to build something in public for a while, and there’s no time like the present.

I’ve had an idea kicking around in my head for a privacy-first CRM that’s aimed at very small companies/operations. It’s directly informed by my own experiences working in Noko, and publicizing my music.

The audience is very focused on small operations. Stuff like my music, smaller SaaSes/service businesses. Where you want *some* place to keep track of leads & seeing who your most valuable customers are, but you specifically don’t want to track a ton of data.

And there are ancillary/modern assumptions, like tracking different product purchases by default, tracking influencers/promo efforts, and some way of ranking how effective you find particular marketing channels.

Some implementation notes:

• It’ll also be a real-world example of a passkeys first application; because right now there are way too few of those
• It’s a chance to really use Web Push!
• I know it’ll be a vanilla/minimal JS app; to prove again that you don’t need a ton to make a great, useful app.
• I think I’ll also be working on a vanilla JS/HTML variant of Standerd, made by my friends over at Nicer Studios. Have to try it out before I make that call