Build 01/30: Making an URSYS App Example

I'm starting a 30 Day Building Challenge to build and share something every day to help get my design business restarted. I'm not exactly sure what the business will look like, but today's exploration started with foundational software technology.

Starting with the Software Foundation

I originally thought of making a new tracker form based on the Activity Bingo BoardThis is a "what should I be working on" diagram. See the October 10 Report for a detailed description. that could help me start each day with a clear idea of what I could be doing. However, I also wanted to make it using custom software rather than use an illustration program to do it manually. Having the technoogy to offer user-customizeable forms on my website is one of my design business objectives.

I already have a web application library called Sri's Universal Realtime System or URSYS. This collects what I've learned from the past 10 years of doing Javascript development for Learning Sciences research. Refining this library through continued use is a good way to keep it fresh in my mind and continue its development.

Today's Sharepiece: Eleventy Typescript App Experiment!

⊕ show captionBuild 01 - The example-sna-typescript repo is designed for quickly prototyping networked web applications.

Today's build is a cloneable template for using URSYS which you can find on my Github repo! It includes a build system with a dynamic client- and server-side import system, with a home grown transactional message system running over websockets.

TRY THE CODE

• dsriseah/example-sna-typescript

BUILD CHALLENGE COMMENTARY

The template is serviceable, needing additional work to provide typing so "Live Linting" will work, but this step provides the following strategic advantages:

1. Lets me quickly make a web app experiment that can be shared.
2. Helps me further refine the URSYS library, building capability for future projects

A likely next step is to figure out how to deliver the bundled javascript code as part of this personal knowledge management system, but I would rather just focus on writing a snippet of code that outputs some nice formatted SVG text that I can import as a regular asset.

So that is the first day of building! A slow start, but also a manageable one.