#134—

Day 49

By Nat Welch

RC is holding Never Graduate Week. This is actually a pretty cool idea, it's basically an alumni week that brings a lot of people to NYC to work together as if they were still actively attending RC. This is nice, because RC operates similar to the idea of an Eagle Scout. Recursers are told to "Never Graduate" and because of this, are Recursers for life. This is similar to Eagle Scouts, in that when a Scout achieves the rank of Eagle, they are told to basically lead by example to improve society and those around them.

I spent the morning recovering from acting as tour guide for my family. In the afternoon, I went in to Manhattan, had a long mexican lunch in the East Village. While I ate and sipped on a beer, I journaled, thinking about the future, things I want to build, etc.

One thing I came across was an idea that I had sketched out after I heard something similar from someone during my first few weeks at RC: build a simple RSS reader that focuses on being consumable in a way similar to a physical newspaper. Once I got to RC, I started sketching that out.

Once I had a rough sketch of the front page, I decided to start prototyping. Some technical goals I set for myself:

  • Try and crib some css design techniques from @mrmrs_ and @jxnblk.
  • Build another Go App Engine app.

Thankfully, some of the problems I had with Go on App Engine have been fixed, so getting a "hello world" up and running was easier than the last time.

The downside, I didn't really know where to start in terms of building "the new shiny". Both @mrmrs_ and @jxnblk seem to big on npm and Grunt for preprocessing their CSS, which was neat. But I quickly found myself down a deep hole, just from their side projects.

Do I use BassCSS or Tachyons? Are they even competitors? What are the pros and cons? Should I use a getting started template like MNML, nkd, trim or monobass?

With so many choices, I was gonna just write raw CSS, but then I saw this tweet:

And was shamed back into looking through all of the side projects and reading their source and seeing how things were set up. Some of the many sites I looked at:

I ended up taking a combo of MNML and Tachyons, but I have no idea if that's the route I'm going to stick with. Now I think I need to actually get some working features.

Totally unrelated, I came across this post, which caused me to do a few more sketches for my drum machine I was working on last week.

Tomorrow I'll hopefully spend all day at RC and meet some alumni, instead of just clicking around looking at pretty boxes.

/Nat

#hackerschool

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