The web is an interesting and excited place to develop for. However, the ecosystem of Javascript, and even Typescript, are not pleasant. Everything is always in flux, from the libraries to the tooling. A hot new thing springs up every other day, and frameworks get abandoned just as quickly. In my experience, I spend more than half my time fighting the tool chain and not understanding how anything works.
This is why I am excited about Webassembly and Blazor – Microsoft’s C#-backed solution to create web apps. Blazor gives me a reliable, stable solution to build for the web without the usual webdev hassle.
As per usual, a went about creating a small, functional personal project with the goal to learn. I made many mistakes along the way and would do a lot of things differently (my code architecture is an absolute mess!), but overall it’s a success and I’m happy with it.
What did I make? Well, the title gave it away but I recreated the daily word-puzzle game, Wordle!
Recreating an existing project in an interesting exercise, as it requires you to really break down the mechanics. In general personal projects, the guildlines are not that strict and if something functions slightly differently, you just go with it. But when recreating, the goal is to get as close as possible. Now, my end product is still a bit different (and missing a few things like the scoreboard), but there were many situations where I had to pull up the original project and reference the behavior.
The last thing I wanted to comment about is knowing when to call it good enough. I realized at some point in this project that I was heading down a path to perfection. There are things I would like to improve and things I just completely skipped, but I think I accomplished my goals. I’m at a point of diminishing returns where I’d rather take what I’ve learned from this project and apply it to my next project.
As such, thanks for reading and hopefully I’ll share another project soon.