2025-03-28
(Mod: 2025-05-27)
| 2 minutes
Remember that time I said that setting up a git repo is one of the first signs of life in a coding project? Well one of the next signs is when you’ve learned enough about the tools you’re building to see that you’ve been doing it wrong…
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A feeling of dread has been slowly creeping up on me for a few days now, which I’ve been persistently able to ignore, but today I finally caved in to the inevitable and started a rewrite.
The tool in question is the shadow maker. The system was almost completed, but every time I had to tweak the code, I could see that I was making it increasingly fragile. Too many special cases and exceptions were piling on, and I was getting progressively less sure with each change where things were happening and where to actually make the edits: an irrefutable indication that I was now working more with spaghetti than sculpture.
But I’m pretty pleased with the rewrite, which one again feels compact, efficient, and logically organized. Hopefully it will be wrapped up before bed tonight and I’ll be able to resume forward progress tomorrow.
Meanwhile, I’ve also realized that my git repo actually needs to be split in two: one for the pipeline tools that generate the site, and one for the site contents. The content repo will be used to snapshot changes to the site and to deploy updates to my hosting service, but by keeping the pipeline repo separate, it will be easier to use it to run additional sites, if I ever want to, or to share the system with others, without also having to give them my entire website.
These are not revelations to anybody who works with code, but they’re still fun milestones in the evolution of a growing project and I like to celebrate the little things too.
