January countdown - 10
31 December 2023
It's been a while since I've indulged in a January Project, a side project for the daft days after Christmas where I try something new. This coming January I thought I'd try something a little different, I thought I'd try ten of them. Start the countdown.
10. To start with, I've been thinking about being more deliberate about my choice of the tools of my trade. After a lot of years & a lot of different projects a lot of different languages and libraries have crept in. They all made sense at the time, & they were all fun in their different ways, but over time some of them have become technical debt. So, out with the old, etc.
As 2023 drew to a close I had different scripts running in JavaScript, Python, Ruby, & TypeScript. Now they're all in Python except for Zine & some code I'll get to in the coming countdown. I had server side code running in PHP, Ruby, & for a while there Rust & Swift too. Now it's all (going to be) Python & maybe Kotlin. On the desktop I had C#, Rust, & Swift, & that's all moved to Kotlin now. I can't get rid of Javascript in the browser, but that's only three languages I have to be on top of now – JavaScript, Kotlin, & Python – down from nine.
Zine's the last Ruby code I have running. Anywhere. I'm rather fond of it, but for the moment I'm ruling a red line under Ruby, which also means Zine in its current form. Ruby was good, Ruby was more than good, in its day in a lot of ways it was great, but for a lot of different reasons it's showing its age now, it just hasn't kept up. I'm not ruling it out, I'm just putting my use of it on hold. For now.
I committed the start of a rewrite of Zine I'd been half working on to a feature branch, not knowing if I'll come back to it. I might, but the deck's now clear. Out with 2023. Out with the old, & on to 2024, January, & the rest of the countdown.