Thinking While I Think
Feb 2, 2022 19:20:17 GMT -8
Post by Uncle Buddy on Feb 2, 2022 19:20:17 GMT -8
Not that blogs are the latest thing, and not that I hadn't read lately that they're no longer cool, and not that this isn't really a forum if anyone wants to use it as one, and not that I'm promising to post regularly, but I've been using this medium lately to think out loud as I make design decisions and I think I like doing it.
Bad ideas sometimes sound hollow to my ears only after communicating them outwardly. Inside my head they might sound great till I say out loud, "Hey, guess what, I'm planning to save the world with genealogy software," and suddenly the whole scheme is revealed for what it is. Entertainment for little old me.
While on the topic of naive things I don't want to attempt, let me reiterate that Treebard GPS will probably never be a program for adding thousands upon thousands of persons. Treebard v. 0.0.0 should handle any size tree and probably not be written in Python, but I am a novice GUI writer, not a computer programmer, and the heavyweight technical stuff such as memory management, GEDCOM, drawing charts, etc. is beyond my level of interest and, due to my age and health, more or less beyond my ability. Treebard GPS continues to represent a demo showcase of unusually desirable functionalities for genieware. The ones I have the capacity to deal with, not the others.
In case anyone out there is actually trying to grok my code, for any reason, if I post more often about what my plans, hopes, and intentions are, it might help the hopefully interested parties decide what it is they're supposed to be interested in.
I also reserve the right to never write another line of code and never post here again. This has been a full-time hobby for almost four years and I can't say it's done anything for my health to spend this much time in a chair. Whether I keep going or give up... it doesn't matter. I think I've already made my point and I'm pretty sure I will have finished the basic GUI and database setup for a highly functional genieware foundation that anyone would be happy to have designed... sometime this year. That's not a promise.
The main point is that genealogists who know what they want in a genieware can and should get more involved with designing genealogy software, and I'm trying to show how that might be done. I'm not the first person to use Python to model new product ideas. It's done all the time. Companies model some software in Python because it's easy, and when they get it right, they translate it to a compiled language. Any good programmer could copy functionalities from Treebard GPS into production code, effectively translating my amateur attempts into any programming language using any widget toolkit to write the user interface.
A guy like me--but with a lot more practical experience in programming--once said that writing perfect genieware is like boiling the ocean. The pain in my back from sitting in this chair for over 3-1/2 years deliriously interested in proving I can do this... kinda makes me more and more certain that Treebard v. 0.0.0 will be someone else's project.
Bad ideas sometimes sound hollow to my ears only after communicating them outwardly. Inside my head they might sound great till I say out loud, "Hey, guess what, I'm planning to save the world with genealogy software," and suddenly the whole scheme is revealed for what it is. Entertainment for little old me.
While on the topic of naive things I don't want to attempt, let me reiterate that Treebard GPS will probably never be a program for adding thousands upon thousands of persons. Treebard v. 0.0.0 should handle any size tree and probably not be written in Python, but I am a novice GUI writer, not a computer programmer, and the heavyweight technical stuff such as memory management, GEDCOM, drawing charts, etc. is beyond my level of interest and, due to my age and health, more or less beyond my ability. Treebard GPS continues to represent a demo showcase of unusually desirable functionalities for genieware. The ones I have the capacity to deal with, not the others.
In case anyone out there is actually trying to grok my code, for any reason, if I post more often about what my plans, hopes, and intentions are, it might help the hopefully interested parties decide what it is they're supposed to be interested in.
I also reserve the right to never write another line of code and never post here again. This has been a full-time hobby for almost four years and I can't say it's done anything for my health to spend this much time in a chair. Whether I keep going or give up... it doesn't matter. I think I've already made my point and I'm pretty sure I will have finished the basic GUI and database setup for a highly functional genieware foundation that anyone would be happy to have designed... sometime this year. That's not a promise.
The main point is that genealogists who know what they want in a genieware can and should get more involved with designing genealogy software, and I'm trying to show how that might be done. I'm not the first person to use Python to model new product ideas. It's done all the time. Companies model some software in Python because it's easy, and when they get it right, they translate it to a compiled language. Any good programmer could copy functionalities from Treebard GPS into production code, effectively translating my amateur attempts into any programming language using any widget toolkit to write the user interface.
A guy like me--but with a lot more practical experience in programming--once said that writing perfect genieware is like boiling the ocean. The pain in my back from sitting in this chair for over 3-1/2 years deliriously interested in proving I can do this... kinda makes me more and more certain that Treebard v. 0.0.0 will be someone else's project.