💻 #100DaysOfCode Day 10/100

Checkpoint 1 of 10 — BashUX, VectorWeb, and Jot

Screen capture of BashUX test

Checkpoint 1/10 (Day 10/100)

Today I completed 10 days of the #100DaysOfCode challenge. So far, I’ve built a few things that I would not have produced otherwise, and they’ve turned out to be really interesting projects and tools for future dev work.

These are the three concept projects I’ve come up with so far:

• BashUX (a text-based UI toolkit for Bash CLI)
• VectorWeb (simple web-based SVG editor concept)
• Jot (a mobile app for tracking and organizing information)

BashUX

Two of my all-time favorite topics in computing are CLI development and retro-style user experiences, and so I combined the two with BashUX. This project (which is demonstrated in the screenshot above) aims to be a SDK of sorts implemented in pure Bash for building terminal-based user interfaces that do much more than simply read and write in serial line-by-line fashion.

So far, BashUX includes config and setup, an internal clock and event system, screen init and render, content alignment, color output, blinking cursor, and debugging output. One of my future plans for this is a Bash implementation of the classic snake game, which seems like an interesting experiment in pushing the shell environment beyond any conventional limitations. Other future uses include tools for DevOps and general system maintenance, or terminal apps for social networking or communication among other things.

VectorWeb

Something that I’ve been interested in experimenting with for some time is a vector graphics editor web application. One night while researching games and game engines, I figured it was time to hack on this idea for an hour or so, and so I created the VectorWeb repo and a basic cursor tracker to start with. Here is a screenshot of the app boilerplate with cursor:

Screenshot of VectorWeb concept

Jot

The idea for Jot came from a need to store everyday information in a format that I can control, and eventually be able to create graph relationships with (and do other interesting things with also). This project repo so far consists of a mobile boilerplate app and the foundations of a PGSQL-backed API. While there are dozens of note-taking and organization apps available on the market today, none of them do exactly what I need for keeping track of my personal tasks and ideas (in addition to content and other ideas at work).

Only 90 Days to Go 😊

With 90 days remaining, I’m hoping to finish at least one of these projects and possible create a few more, in addition to up-cycling the results of my research into content for education and training purposes. Here we go!

Kenneth Reilly (8_bit_hacker) is CTO of LevelUP