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What I plan to write and make in 2022

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You’ve probably looked through my 2021 retrospective and while I mentioned some vague plans for the year, I have a few specifics in mind. As a premium reader, you’re able to get a look into some of these specifics.

Honestly, writing this out has really been helpful as it gives me clarity on what I’m supposed to be doing.

Projects

These fall into two categories

  1. Projects I plan to make soon to build a minimum viable portfolio:
    • My personal sites, farai.xyz and codelab.farai.xyz.
    • My GitHub Projects page, which needs an overhaul
    • YouTube x RSS—This will be a site which can extract RSS feeds from YouTube channels and playlists. The only issue I have is how to make it work for the new YouTube channel urls which requires API access that I didn’t want to use.
    • Just a Random Drawing App—For some reason I felt like making a drawing app. I’ve got the basics down, the issue now is putting everything together.
    • Word Clock—A clock made up of words. I made something like it a couple years ago, but I want to give it another shot.
    • Voronoi Diagram—For some reason, I’ve been enchanted by computer generated art like Voronoi Diagrams. So far I’ve managed a very inefficient yet functional proof of concept1. A colorful array of tiny polygons There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done, but it’s good enough for a post I’m planning to guest write as it proves my point.
  2. Projects I plan to make once I’ve made the previous ones:
    • A site which tries to find the most profitable farm you can make in Stardew Valley.— I made this long ago and I even wrote about it. Not sure where it went but the idea was that it would become a big series complete with excessive bikeshedding.
    • A digital implementation of the board game Nefarious.—I started this long ago and I only got as far as entering the card information. It’s been shelved ever sinve.
    • A flight information display for Amsterdam airport—I’ve always wanted to make something using the Schipol Airport API, but COVID hit so it didn’t make sense since everything would be cancelled2.
    • An accessible color pair generator—I spent far more time than I should have trying to figure out how to generate an accessible color pair, running into matrices and abstract algebra which weren’t necessary. I have the general idea, but there are so many little details that need to be ironed out.
    • Conway’s Game of Life
    • Implementing 6 Degrees of Bacon—IMDb have datasets so I want to see if this holds.
  3. Projects I plan on doing in the distant future:
    • Zim PAYE Calc—Again, I’ve made this before but it looked like ass. I hope to try it again, but the previous projects are more interesting to me right now.
    • RSS Feed Checker—The main idea is that I want a way to evaluate web feeds, State of the Web. This is in Python, which is what I wrote long ago when I learned it in college. Again, there are so many little details to consider so it’ll be a far out project.
    • Zim Election Results—I started working on this project a very long time ago, right after the Zimbabwe’s 2018 election. I got as far as scraping their PDF results before shelving this project out of laziness.
    • My Money Collection—I’ve collected bank notes over the years and I want to share them with the world. The problem I have with this project is that I don’t know how to take pictures of the money. I should get a macro lens for my phone.
    • Every Money—Don’t think I got out of the idea phase with this one but I wanted to make a bot which tweets out every money out there.
    • My Laptop Stickers—In college, my laptop had lots of stickers, mostly from hackathons and career fairs (which I failed to capitalize on). Another project that didn’t go beyond an idea.
    • Patreon /Buttondown.email ExporterI couldn’t find export functionality for patreon, but I did find a JSON when I used the web inspector. There was something similar with buttondown, but they now statically generate pages.

Given all this, I’ve got my work cut out for me this year. There’s a chance that I’ll get heavily side tracked and find more projects to add, but this is what’s on my mind right now, especially after scribbling my ideas over and over again.

Posts

This will be less polished than the projects section given how I have far more ideas

  • What exactly does “7 days of in browser usage” in terms of iOS’s web storage?
  • How To Use AVIF
  • HTTP, what everything builds on
  • Comparing Image Formats
  • Comparing Video Formats
  • Comparing Alt Text Generators
  • Blur Hash vs Small Image vs Gradient
  • Don’t use GIFS
  • Better Web Feed Ids and how to use them
  • Hugo Redirects file
  • RSS Club (Hi!)
  • Book Reviews
  • Web Workers v. Service Workers v. Worklets v. Web Sockets [Current assignment]
  • Capitalizing on Hugo’s Render Hooks
  • Objective Image Metrics (Intro to VMAF)
  • Color Contrast with CSS Level 5 colors
  • To WWW or not?
  • Generating Accessible Colors
  • And much much more with more coming based on how my mind feels.

In addition to these, I’m planning to create a podcast. It’s still in the idea phase but it’ll have something to do with things that computers do that make you go wat [VIDEO 4:17]. For instance, the clusterfuck that is USB-C.

  1. Did you know Firefox can save canvases as images? I didn’t know that. ↩︎

  2. Cancel culture has truly run amock. ↩︎