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The joy of quiet coding

substack.com
submitted
a year ago
bykaiserseahorsetoprogramming

Summary

I never planned to code up a text layout engine from scratch. It took me the best part of four months to complete. Instead of laying text out in boxes, why not lay it out in shapes? Any shape! And for bonus points, track the text along bendy paths.

Rik Abushaar is the maintainer of an open source JavaScript library. He says he is not a normal person and doesn't like to worry about his place in the world. He has never felt the need to measure his worth by the wage he earns or his job title.

One of the most important childhood lessons was that there are no Knights In Shining Armour, especially not in the real world. But my aggressive self-reliance? That probably arose due to me being born a long time after the rest of the brood. Having parents who fed me and shod me and let me just get on with life was more blessing than curse.

After Flash died, space opened up for intrepid code warriors to write libraries for the HTML element. Most canvas libraries use the scene graph to stamp a red box on a black background. I think the main reason why people don't use Scrawl-canvas is because it's too different to what they expect a canvas library to be.

I built my own tween system and added it to the library. I did it because I could do it; people have a right to moan about the big increase in the library’s size, but nobody has complained to me yet. The results of the work please me and, at the end of the day, that’S all that matters.

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14

3 Comments

4
iareunique
a year ago
The biggest takeaway, and one devs seem to struggle with, is that you're not going to please everyone. Not everything is a popularity contest and you should build things to solves real problems. Fixing all of your previous mistakes are better than keeping legacy code around for backwards compatibility. How many people complain about Microsoft Windows being bloated?
2
boredgamer
a year ago
I guess quiet coding is just his concept of just what most everyone does: build something for yourself and use it. Not everything needs to be The Next Big Thing ™️
1
justadev
a year ago
Really makes me wonder how many amazing passion projects are sitting in GitHub that nobody has heard but solve amazing problems?