Devlog: September 10, 2023
A friend of mine likes to say “every app either starts or ends as a spreadsheet.”
My wife and I have a spreadsheet we use to track our savings and what we are savings towards. The best feature of this spreadsheet is that it projects when we will meet our goals. I didn’t set things up perfectly, so it’s gotten out of sync and the projections are wrong right now. I thought this might be a nice thing to convert to an app of some sort.
I recently read Hypermedia Systems1. It got me hyped to try out Htmx. I got a Go server running with Fiber, added Htmx, Alpine.js, and Picocss. I was ready to go.
I started thinking things through in my thinking chair. A line from Hypermedia Systems came to mind. Under the section “When Shouldn’t You Use Hypermedia?” The authors write, “One example that springs immediately to mind is an online spreadsheet application.”
🤦🏻♂️
It still could be done, but probably not the best idea to start with.
What did I end up doing? During a work meeting that I didn’t really need to pay attention to, I took 10 mins and fixed the logic in my spreadsheet. It now appears to calculate things correctly. This was the right solution.
Now I need to find a new project to try Htmx on. I’m sure I could still make this project work with Htmx, but I want to try it on something it is especially well-suited for.
If you can get over the overuse of emphasis in the book, I think this is a worthwhile read and I quite enjoyed it. Not only did the ideas and philosophies speak to me, I thought they did a good job of answering every question I had about Htmx going into it.↩︎