New year, more personal projects to procrastinate on.

A few years ago I thought an idea called "TODO Everything" which can be summed up as "The TODO app that does everything." I had ideas of grandeur where it would have every feature imaginable; integrate a bunch of different services; be a bunch of different services; have complex backend systems that would do anything you need. It's an insane idea, and I always loved thinking about it. Essentially, it's something like a "Scope Creep Simulator", or maybe the absolute opposite of what code golf is.

The purpose of Todo apps is pretty simple: people need toy/example/test apps to build, especially when learning a new language/framework/platform/etcetera. In the web app world there's a few that come to mind: blogs, social media clones, and Todo apps. Essentially, they're just CRUD apps with a database (or some type of data storage) that can maybe have multiple users and maybe a few actions can be done (i.e. completing a Todo item, or liking a post). That's it.

Of course, you'd want the scope to be minimal since you're just learning your shiny new language or tool, but it can get exponentially more interesting when you silence your inner Project Manager/Lead Developer and tell yourself, "You know what? We can add a few more weeks to this feature in order to get it working on a local Kubernetes cluster running on your Raspberry Pis."

So, a month or so ago that's what I did. I've engineered myself into corners and bulldozed those walls to create even more corners, but it has been interesting and mostly fun to work on. Will this be a major start up that will change people's lives for the better and solve global healthcare? No. 99.999% guaranteed to do nothing, but some learning's getting done, maybe it'll help other people as well.

I've created the GitHub organization todo-everything that will house everything "TODO: Everything" (actual "real" name not confirmed). So far the following are up in mostly working condition with an infinity of features left to go.

• Backend written in Python + Django. Mainly using Django for its ORM and django-rest-framework
  • https://github.com/todo-everything/todo-everything-django
• A frontend written in TypeScript using SolidJS and Vite ( the solid-ts vite template). This was written first to get a feel for the API. Probably should be written later, but that's a story for a different post.
  • https://github.com/todo-everything/todo-everything-solid
• Another frontend written TypeScript using React, SWC and also Vite (react-swc-ts template).
  • https://github.com/todo-everything/todo-everything-react
• Everything OPs related. So far just some Ansible and Kubernetes files, but it also supports ARM because of Raspberry Pis.
  • https://github.com/todo-everything/todo-everything-ops

I've learned more in the past few months than I have even in some other jobs since it's completely void of any "business" and "logic". At least for now. Hah, but no this will almost never be a viable business idea. I do have a feature idea for todo-everything, though, that would integrate Stripe (initially) charge a user a metered rate for each Todo item the create and complete. Another very wild idea, but I think I've actually seen a variant of that on an existing iOS Todo app... Future post ideas are abundant, but that's the end of this one for now.

Dreaming big and making my backlog infinite when time is very much limited. This is 2024.