Miscellaneous Personal Notes to Consider as Scaffold Moves Forward

I have some other thoughts that I wanna throw out into the ether without cluttering that last blog post I just made that was already getting pretty long.

First, I have been working through the Stanford machine learning course on Coursera and it has been an awesome time so far! I am excited to finally be following a structured machine learning curriculum and am looking forward to being able to build a much smarter v2 of Scaffold in a couple of months. Also, if it seems like my work on Scaffold is slowing down a bit, it is most likely because I am now working through the ML course material (as well as job hunting/interview studying/keeping my cpp fresh).

Secondly, I just really need to throw out into the ether that I am not particularly fond of front-end engineering and I would be lying if I said that I am looking forward to the UI implementation/design portion of this project.

I appreciate the field of design and I don't find it insane that there are developers who find front-end fun. I have minors in psychology and studio art which, along with the CS major, seems like the recipe for a front-end developer. Instead, it has been the recipe for a back-end developer who is interested in using computation to model intelligence and making surrealist sketches of cats officiating at bird weddings as a side hobby.

I am committed to my vision of Scaffold taking form as a web app. I want it to be a tool accessible that non-technical individuals can benefit from in addition to technical users. I can live through a bit of HTML boredom to make that happen. In addition, I have never constructed a web app top-to-bottom on my own and it's something that I stand to learn a lot from doing. This project is also largely fueled by my desire to strengthen and extend my skills as a developer.

Worst-case scenario I will gain experience in an area of the stack I don't work much in. Best-case scenario, I have a grand time, take back everything I said before, and broaden my horizons. My current dislike of front-end engineering doesn't make me more useful, more interesting, or a better back-end engineer. But I wanted to own up to it here because it honestly has effected how I have gone about the development process so far (i.e. building an inadvisable amount of back-end functionality before considering how it was going to integrate into the rest of a web app stack).

I want to think of clever way to wrap this up but honestly I have had to pee for like forty-five minutes so I'm just going to post this so I can close my laptop and run to the restroom.