peter krupa dot lol

I’m working on coding a desktop RSS reader with a GUI and the process is going like this: (1) design a feature, (2) work on the feature on one end, (3) find out it doesn’t work or I need to learn some new library to make it work on the other end, (4) mostly finish the feature but now I have to completely change the other end, (5) also, I’ve thought about it more and changed the parameters for the features I want, so (6) start over at (1).

It’s frustrating, but I realized I’m not just learning coding with this process, I’m learning design and project management, and even though I am the client, the designer, the developer, and the project manager, I’m still having communication issues haha lol lmao. OK, but I have been learning-by-doing and some of the early lessons are as follows:¹

• Define the features you want from the beginning. I imagine this is kind of a moving target in many cases depending on the client, but as much as possible, I should nail down the stuff that is nail-down-able.
• Do the back end first. Break the work down into as many pieces (classes/methods) as possible that return discrete objects that can be manipulated and used in whatever way the front-end designer (future me) decides.
• GUIs suck, use a browser if you need to display a lot of content. Tkinter has been really interesting and I’ve enjoyed the learning process, but using it to display articles for reading is a terrible idea. The GUI should be used for interacting with the functions in my program and getting user input, and that’s it.

Attending to the first bullet point on my little list here, and in response to some comments from a friend, I’m going to pivot (!!) away from a desktop RSS feed reader and toward a desktop RSS feed parser that searches for keywords and saves the entries that hit into an HTML document that can be opened in a browser for review. This means I can focus on building the logic of the parser, plus a mechanism for managing a database of saved RSS feeds and search terms. That’s probably a lot for now, so I’ll leave the front-end GUI for later, when I have everything running correctly from the terminal. OK? OK.

1. Do not @ me about agile. I am familiar with agile. I have thoughts about it, but I will not put them here, yet. ↩︎