Day 42: ...Intention is almost done

Me yesterday: “I’m excited to finish Intention, but first, I gotta finish Hide Feed!”

Also me yesterday: “Why don’t I replace a lot of the old code in Intention with the helpers and wrappers I created for Hide Feed?”

5 hours later, I’d rewritten all of Intention.

It’s about 80% done, but the 20% will be the trickiest because that’s the part that does all the URL handling. Also, I haven’t rewritten the permissions to be as granular as possible, so maybe there’s a lot more than 20% left to do.

Still, I was surprised by how easy it was to rewrite such large portions of Intention given the new building blocks I had created for Hide Feed. I was able to remove hundreds of lines of code just because I’m using better abstractions and a cleaner architecture.

I’m happy to see that I’m getting better as a coder — actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that I’m getting better at developing Chrome extensions. When I was developing Intention several months ago, I was super proud of my codebase and felt that it was as good as it can be. Revisiting it yesterday, I saw how unnecessarily complicated so many parts were and simplifying them felt incredibly satisfying. Now it really does feel like the codebase is really solid, but I’m sure that if I were to look at it in several months, I’d find all sorts of areas that can be drastically improved.

Anyway, since I started working on Intention against my better judgment, I might as well finish it. That means that I have a week to ship it. The criterion that I’m using for “ship it” is that I’ll post it to Hacker News. Actually, demo nights at the 10-week residency I’m doing are on Mondays so I’ll extend the target date a bit and make a post on Hacker News on Tuesday, February 25.