Here we are! This is the second article from my series explaining how to succeed with your side projects. The first part is here. I’m sure by know you read the first part every time you go to bed, so you won’t have difficulties to link it to this article. If not, I would advise you to read it first. We’ll focus on the tools this time. What techniques did I use to successfully build the first beta version of my side project Sharetoall?

Once upon a time, I was a proud Ubuntu user. It was easy to install, easy to use, and it seemed to answer my needs. But month after month, my pride decreased as much as my annoyance increased. Ubuntu was letting me down: Weird display bugs were popping from time to time. It was slow. I had to compile manually a lot of applications not available (are outdated). I had to learn a lot of random shortcuts for every tool I was using.

It’s 2am. Your eyes are tired, you know you’re coding nonsense but you can’t look away from your computer. With a shacking hand you catch a bottle containing a mix of sugar and caffeine. This horrible bug in your code won’t let you in peace till you destroy it. You spent five hours non-stop on it. But still, you don’t see the end of the nightmare. Your bed call you, but you don’t listen.

They were coded by Dave, your colleague developer. The classes are full of formatting errors, poor indentation and weird one letter variables. There are so many dependencies you need to scroll down for minutes to escape the bloated constructor. Shacking, you open the unit tests to understand how it should work… but they don’t exist. Horror and misfortune! You could ask Dave to come to your desk, yelling at him that you never saw anywhere such a crappy code, cursing him and his family for generations to come.

Once upon a time, a fearful young developer (me) wanted to write magnificent code. I was seeing generations of developers speaking about it, as we speak about pyramids two thousands years after their construction. I wanted to let my mark in the world! Therefore, I did what I thought would be the best: avoiding every traps everybody felt into, by following the Holy Coding Principles, created by the Ones Who Have the Knowledge.