Starbase Zebra is essentially an exercise in creating things just for creation’s sake. Given that there is no criteria for success other than my own entertainment, Starbase Zebra thusfar is a very successful creation, and it’s only been in production for twelve days.
On the one hand, I think it is incredibly bizarre that what I am most entertained by right now is writing a “website” for myself. Considering that’s kind of like working at home after doing work at work. Except its not, because I’m using totally different tech stacks than I do at work, and I’m doing very different things with them.
(I say “website” because I tend to think of Starbase Zebra as a web application instead of as a website. To me, when I hear “website”, I think of old school HTML documents served by Apache as documents. I think that’s actually relatively recent prejudice that I’ve formed - one that I’ll probably write a whole post about.)
On the other hand, it’s an exercise in creativity. I wouldn’t find it weird if I had fun writing fiction, or doing some other creative activity. I don’t think that it’s just because writing fiction is not my job, but writing software is.
It’s perhaps a bit silly that I spent as much time as I have to add multi-factor authentication to a login page that nobody other than myself will ever find or access. Or that I wrote a system to invoke a Discord webhook in the event of an error, on a system that I don’t really ever expect to have errors. Or that I spent time to generate a sitemap for a website that I don’t even care if nobody ever finds. But I’m doing these things because I enjoy doing them, and they’ve all been small things that I’ve learned how to do very quickly.
There’s a loop that’s actually quite satisfying in all of this. You take an idea, figure out how to implement it, write the implementation, test the implementation, fix the implementation, and then move on to the next little idea. And then release these finished things in a package. It’s the SDLC writ small, an actually Agile process without the groaning that comes from “Agile” in practice thanks to not having to deal with constraints from other people. I can also do it really quickly, which makes it more fun. Plus, it spawns other new ideas of things to do that I wouldn’t otherwise think of.
I guess what makes it feel ludicrous to me is the discipline I’m applying to do these things. I have Jira boards (one for OPS and one for DEV). I’m doing one-week sprints (this is Sprint 2). I’m writing blog posts once every two days. I actually did all of these sorts of things for the last side project, but that was for other people. This is just pure self-indulgence.
I think I’ll add “Pure Self-Indulgence” and “Creating for Creation’s Sake” to the subtitle database.