I wrote a macOS app!
In which I write a macOS app to track important pull requests.
There are a couple of apps I’ve been wanting to write, so the time has come to learn to code! Unsurprisingly, this makes hubby happy, as now I can more readily empathize with the geeky coding plights of a senior web dev.
It’s actually been pretty interesting, so far.
I first taught myself to code in Basic when I was 12 or 13 on a Commodore 128 computer; programs were on floppy disks then, the 5 1/4" kind. I had a handful of programs that came with the computer, which my family bought used for $400; a lot of money in the early ’90s. (They’d spend $999 on my next computer in the mid-’90s, a Packard Bell Pentium 75mHz machine, running Windows 3.11. I was a lucky little kid.)
Of the programs that came with the Commodore, I adored the text-based adventure games the most. They were a cross between interactive fiction, and what I imagined D&D must be like (having not yet played it, at that point) - and the one I played the most was based on The Hobbit. I loved it so much that I decided I should write my own, so I’d have different adventures to play.
So I dug into the code, figured out how the game was written, copied-and-pasted bits of it, and started writing my own games. Of course, then came debugging, because a 12-year-old copying-and-pasting code is far from bulletproof. So I had to figure out how the code actually worked, so I could fix the bits that broke.
But that was a long time ago, and my first love remained writing, so I never really pursued coding as computers and languages evolved. (Although I did have a side gig in computers when I founded a computer repair business, for a while, which mostly involved replacing dead hardware, doing upgrades for people, or wiping someone’s drive that had gotten all crudded-up with malware and reinstalling Windows.)
Fast forward to today, when there are a couple of apps that have been percolating in the back of my mind for a while. I’ve been waiting for someone to write one of them for a couple of years, but everything that comes along isn’t quite what I want… so now I’m annoyed and fed-up enough that I’m ready to write it myself.
App number one is fairly trivial, and something that I really just want to use myself; I don’t care if another person ever buys it. But that app should serve as training wheels for the more important app I want to write; one that will hopefully be useful to an entire industry.
Right now, I’m working my way through Swift Playgrounds to get some of the basic fundamentals under my belt. I’m also reading a couple of books. Maybe this time I’ll make it through Chris Pine’s Learn to Program, a great beginner book hubby gifted to me ages ago. From there, I’ve got a couple of other courses lined up.
Happily, I’m already familiar with the logic behind programming; some of my work as a technical writer has been to explain that logic to non-programmers, so they can use a very technical app whose interface was developed by engineers, not UI/UX folks. And I remember some of the basics from my old days mucking about in Basic; conditionals and loops are conditionals and loops, 25 years ago or today.
Wish me luck as I dive into this side project! I’m still looking for a paying technical writing gig to cover the bills, but this is a fun way to expand my skills while I hunt for the right fit. And maybe I can bring in a little side income from the apps I’ll write.
If nothing else, I always enjoy stretching my brain and learning new skills, and it’s fun to come full-circle from my early days in computing and dip my toes into coding again.
