The Little Big Things

A few nights ago, I was looking for the source code for a project I worked on in 2019 — a chrome extension I named ChipIt! (pronounced keep it) on my Github but I stumbled upon a small npm package I built in August 2022 and the sheer happiness from making something like that inspired both this post and a few other announcements that will follow.

Movies make software engineering so chill and fulfilling, hacking into the pentagon just for fun on Wednesdays. When you’re one, in reality, the bulk of your tasks may be writing functional tests or CRUD (I really hate writing crud 😭), looking for a bug that’s probably a missing semi-colon somewhere, other times you’re pushing code that should not break for anything, probably because your boss is ‘Boda Government’, so when we get the chance to work on something that does not carry the destiny of a great kingdom on its shoulders, it means so much in a little way.

August was a really rough patch. On Saturday, the 20th, My friends and I were having this small hangout

Jesulademi, Aranwa, Tobi, Folakunmi, Goke, and Paimo

deliberating how to close out multiple projects we were working on at that time but mostly just being unserious. For one of those projects (Gratico), we wanted anonymous comments on articles but we did not want it to be without consequence, in other words, you either sign up and use your name or remain anonymous and get a wicked name from us — things I like to work on!

I called it Anonymous names. It’s not a new thing, in fact, the inspiration was Google docs and how they flagrantly named me ‘anonymous dragon’ one time when I was collaborating on a document.

In 30 minutes, I had the draft of prefixes to use thanks to Goke (grandmaster of mischief), I got a free JSON file of animals (Folakunmi is the free things discovery department chief), then there’s Paimo (Automated pep talk dispenser).

The drawing board of great wickedness

If you ask me, we did this for the greater good of society!😂 Seriously imagine someone shares a really happy moment on a blog or forum and a troll comes trolling only for their comment to end up with the name ‘Unidentified Mountain Goat’ — ahh, PaaS (Payback as a service), I’ve got tears in my eyes.

I set up the repo and built the package with NodeJs in 2 hours. That wasn’t enough though, so I also built a small API to play around with generating anonymous names. Here’s the repo link.

really wondrous!

It’s not perfect or complete though, and I’m not certain I will put in the work, but I will welcome PRs if you feel like this PaaS needs to be better! It is open source, use it as you deem fit — I don’t mind the mentions too.

In the end, I realize that it’s the little and most ordinary things we do that bring the most happiness and that’s what I thought of when I decided to write about this.

I will be doing another little big thing in 2023, I feel like I will write a monthly newsletter (Regular Joe or Regular Dev — help me decide), and I hope to describe in it the reality of software engineering from how I see it, hopefully. It will help a few persons take the little big steps. I’m not committing to it, but I will try.

Edit: Here’s the link to the Newsletter, I’d like you to join the mailing list: Regular Dev (yea, I picked Regular Dev 🌚).

Here’s a link to my first newsletter post. Make sure to subscribe and share.