Side project: Indonesia Merger Calculator
TLDR: I made a merger calculator for Indonesia
Whilst doing household chores on Monday I watched/ listened to this Youtube video of Erik Spiekermann chatting ramblingly about his approach to design work.
The thing that struck a chord with me was his approach to working for friends. Basically:
"I'll do it now and I'll spend a couple of hours, then you can take it or leave it".
A healthy approach I think! Charging friends is messy creates expectations and obligations on both sides etc. etc. but it's also a useful approach to think about side projects. Why do I do side projects? Mainly to scratch an itch, make something that I want to see in the world, or just as an excuse to practice in an area I'm interested in learning more about. I've found though that starting self directed projects can create an obligation to yourself that's fundamentally unhelpful, things can drag on and on, never getting done, living in your head taking up space. It's helpful to limit scope and time and let things be done when they're done.
Anyway, back to the point, after playing Indonesia 3rd edition on the weekend I decided I wanted a calculator for the game's merger bidding system. Calculators undoubtedly already exist but not like I wanted them to.
The basics came together in about half an hour then I spent the next couple of hours browsing Google fonts and drawing the game's icons. Could I spend more time getting it to look just right? absolutely! (though it is suitably beige to fit right in with the game's earlier editions) but it is done and I can move on.
Tangent: I feel like I'm at the point with Svelte, Github workers, and Cloudflare now that I can knock together this kind of thing pretty quickly from parts I have lying around. I like it when it gets to that stage with tools, I've been there before when I was making D3/ Express based stuff for the Financial Times and Flash stuff for the BBC and it's nice to be back in the zone again. I don't feel like the years I spent around the React ecosystem (2017-2022ish) were wasted exactly but it was never a set of technologies which I liked in any way and I found the community around it deeply incurious about the idea there might be other (better!) ways of doing things.