I’ve been in the WordPress ecosystem for a very long time. It’s what got me into web development in the first place.
A friend of mine introduced me to it way back in 2008 or so.
Ever since then, I’ve been messing around with themes, modifying them, making my own attempt to create one, aka theme Acer – unfortunately, it never really saw the light of day back then. Might revive it at some point.
To be honest, I always wanted, but never really pushed to make this into a living. However, about 4 years ago, I decided to quit our family woodworking company and revisited/completed some new courses on WordPress to get a bit more up-to-date on how things work now and started to apply to some jobs.
I ended up working with GoWP ( now Quickly Hire ) and still work there now. However, the unfortunate events of the WP drama have made work a bit more hectic, and fewer clients.
This made me think, that I probably should branch out a bit, and learn some technologies properly and not just the WordPress parts of them.
So that’s what I did.
I finished a course on Advanced PHP, with OOP, and have a project I’m semi-working on.
However, it didn’t really pique my interest as much as I thought. I always liked to mess around with PHP ever since I got introduced to WordPress but yeah..
Learning JS / React / Next
All this leads me to the current day.
I dabbled in JS a while back but somehow it never really got my attention. The long functions and ways to interact with the dom, aka document.getElementByName or similar, just turned me off from it.
When WordPress introduced blocks, I finished a course on react/WordPress blocks, but that seemed very complicated to me back then.
However as time went on, react evolved a lot, and now after finishing a course on NextJS by Brad Traversy, I’m quite enjoying building with it.
The project we built in the course, wasn’t really my thing, as I’m not into real estate, but the project touched on a lot of key areas I feel like.
Project Journey
After completing the above-mentioned course, I thought… This was quite fun. I always enjoyed writing code, and already seeing what happens on the screen. Or… the error it caused!
Since I struggle with quite a bit of anxiety and some other mental symptoms related to it, ( not going into details ) a lot of people suggest that journaling could help. To relieve all the thoughts circling in my head before the end of the day.
I tried Notion, DayOneApp, and physical journaling. However, none really caught me if that makes sense. The apps were not really what I was looking for, or had too many other features I didn’t need, or the ones I needed/wanted were paid features.
So I thought, this could be a great opportunity to create a project that resonates with me, and I could actually use it on a daily basis and a great way to learn reactjs and nextjs and related APIs and packages.
This is where the idea for Project Journey was born.
MVP Features
I have a lot of ideas for what this could be, but for an MVP, here are some of the features I want before I put it up on Vercel or on a similar site.
- Authentication system – for now with Discord oAuth.
- Journals – Kind of like categories, ex: Work, Personal life, negative thoughts, etc…
- Entries – These would be entries in the journals. Ex: Day one at the new job.
- Editor – A clean writing-focused editor, something like how Grammarly has it.
Feature ideas afterwards
Some features I’d like to implement after it’s up and running as an MVP are as follows:
- Media Library – a basic media library, working with Cloudinary.
- Calendar view – a way to see your entries as a calendar, and see what you posted on each day.
- Mood tracker – a way to rate both your physical and mental mood on a daily basis, and have a graph on a dashboard, where u can see how you improved. – potentially, show posts u wrote on those days to reflect what u did that made you feel a certain way.
The plan behind this website
My plan with this website, is to document the journey of creating this app/website and sharing what I learn with others, and to get feedback on it
So if you’re interested in that, feel free to signup to the newsletter so you’ll be notified when a new post comes out 🙂 Max 1 email a week.