Announcement: Hand Crafted Forum
2024.12.05
I've been meaning for a while to build a web project in public.
After some deliberation, I'm settling on a forum. For various reasons:
There does not seem to exist a very good one, or at least, not many choices are available, so if the one or two famous ones do not fit your needs, you are out of luck.
It's familiar enough that most people know what to expect.
It's simple enough on the surface, but more advanced features can contain quite a bit of complexities.
Until we settle on a product/brand name, I'm going to call it "Hand Crafted Forum" (because "hand made" is taken!)
I want to use it to demonstrate a few things I care about in web development:
Straight forward programming. Just data and functions. This means there's not a hint of "OOP". No adapters, no providers, no services, no repositories. It also means we take into account what the computer has to do to accomplish the requested task: we will try to minimize waste, to a point, without requiring deep expertise in low level programming. This implies the data model and transformations are guided by the desired product features, not by some idealized version of what the data is supposed to represent.
Simplified development environment & deployment process. This means not much to install or configure other than language compiler(s). Most things will be embedded libraries instead of external programs. If something *must* be an external program (say, ffmpeg), it will be zero configuration, or we put all the configuration necessary in our own code base. If you have the codebase and the compiler, you can start the local server in one command, and you can deploy to staging/production with one command.
Inside out iteration process We start with the core functionality and add side features and ornamentations later. The UI design will visually suck at first, and gradually get better over time. We will dedicate a lot of time to the UX, because the UX is the product.
