Great! Right now I'll be building a simple project for a job application, but hopefully next week I'll have some time to start some of my own projects.. I'd also love to hear about freelancing, how you choose the technologies you use, how you bill for your time, etc!
A way to find books by different categories (by prizes their authors have won).
I gave up on the site after a month or two (and a lot of work), but I'm putting some more effort into it again. It's the first website I've ever built, so any feedback is appreciated!
For example, browsing through the books by "people" and by "books", the format is inconsistent and I'm not sure which is considered better design (hovering over the card vs the name to activate). Also apologies ahead for it loading all of the images and having no pagination.. Like I said, first website!
Probably doesn't even count as a project, but I mentioned this in the failed side projects thread recently and someone seemed to like the idea!
You can browse books curated by prizes their authors have won ie. books written by Turing Award winners or Fields Medal winners. Anyways, I got encouraged a bit last time and I'm thinking about trying to expand the website a bit, so far I didn't get very far.
I thought about aggregating books by prizes their authors had won, so you could browse books written by chemistry Nobel Prize winners or Fields Medal winners. I quickly gave up on the project, but I'm sure I poured hundreds of hours into it before that. I'm not too despondent about it anymore, and learned a lot (it's my first ever website, and only one so far!) - it was quite gruelling to manually go through all of the authors and choose pictures and attach affiliate links.. I'm sure the affiliate links have already expired as there wasn't a single buy through them.
I would get going with a more popular technology (I chose Svelte and Sapper). Like I mentioned, it's the first website I've ever built, so I ran into some problems that I'm sure would have been easier to deal with had there been a bigger community and more tutorials available. I was fixated on it being as fast as possible, which is perhaps quite ironic with the amount of images it's downloading - not lazily.
I have to admit now that I'm thinking about building a second project, that my technology stack will also be governed by what employers are looking for. I'm currently working in a non-tech industry, but I'm starting to think about trying to transition.
Another thing that came to mind was that I'd try to remove some of the monotonous tasks that made it such a grind, like manually compressing all of the images and trying to find the right size. That was a huge ordeal, and I would've been better off with implementing lazy loading and just running the images through some compression automatically or not compressing them at all. I really should have done that.
I'd also probably try to advertise it a bit more. This is the only time I've mentioned the project, and it's almost a year old. I was just hoping people would magically stumble into it.. I'm sure even a dollar or two from it would have given me the motivation to at least complete the parts I'd planned out for and actually found interesting myself.
Thanks again for the compliment and happy New Year's!
