Photon I feel is a representation of my general ability to do software development, as it’s my biggest project. I’m disappointed in myself for how it’s been going so far suddenly.

I go through these switches in terms of my philosophy with software, and I guess right now I’m in the “it should do what it should well and expectedly, stop trying to do more and sacrifice the main functionality” phase.

I don’t like where Photon ended up, I added too many “”“features”“” that were half baked and just complicated the codebase and added more issue vectors. What people use the most: posts and commenting, have been suffering in their usability with random bugs and a non-seamless experience.

I’ve also been going much too slow on my promises for Svelte 5, and I can’t change much until I’ve finished that or I’ll get conflicts. I’ve been too lazy because of school and my life.

As soon as I finish the svelte 5 migration, I’m gonna change these things:

  • No more features that are out of scope. The “translation”, link shortcuts, etc, are going to be removed or gutted.
  • I’m going to switch a lot more systems to be component based, no more one-off buttons and inconsistent interfaces.
  • This app will focus on Lemmy and follow it more closely if it’s not bad UX.
  • I will switch to a lot more native systems instead of using cursed JavaScript powered ones. For example, I have to make the dock change via CSS instead of checking and changing dynamically in code.
  • Most pages must work server side, and the entire app must be usable somewhat.
  • I’m still conflicted on whether I should make photon run its authentication logic, etc server side or if that can stay client side.

I still am obligated to continue work on Photon, and I need to fulfill the promises I make. I hope Photon will be better in 2025.

  • the_artic_one@programming.devEnglish
    7·
    1 day ago

    I’ve been too lazy because of school and my life.

    You’re not “lazy”, you’re overwhelmed by your other priorities. There’s nothing wrong with needing to prioritize other things in your life. Maintaining a project like this is no small task and you should be proud of all the work you’ve done.

    It sounds like you’re at a point where you’re improving a lot as a developer and starting to become dissatisfied with your older code. Every developer goes through this from time to time, it’s important that you focus on how much you’ve grown instead of tearing yourself down for not being “better” in the past. The only way to learn and improve is to try things and make mistakes. There’s no reason to view these past mistakes as some kind of shame, they’re just the steps that got you from where you were then to where you at now.