Building jargons.dev [#0]: The Initial Commit

#opensource #productivity #javascript #buildinpublic

Yo, my first blog post! I don't even know how to start this haha, but I will just get started 🫣.

Intro

This is the "init" part of a blog series documenting my journey behind building jargons.dev. When I first ideated jargons.dev, I wanted to build it openly, sharing every step with the community. But I was also working on another project called "Hearts ❤️" which required my full attention. To manage both effectively, I decided to work on jargons.dev in a private repository.

Even though it wasn't built entirely in public, I've sort'a documented my thought process and decisions behind imperative pull requests. This series will take you behind the scenes, sharing the challenges, solutions, and lessons learned along the way.

Bits about me 🤭 (or skip to save the read)

My name is Olabode, nothing much to know about me other than I've been in tech for quite a while but not exactly very seriously IMO until I decided and took the biggest decision in my life by quitting my (6-figure paying) 9-5 back in September 2021 to focus on tech (now I wanna be serious 😤). This happened after some thought of how I started, got to where I was at and where I just wanna be (a story for another blogpost for sure). Fast forward June 2023, after the learnings, struggles and all, I discovered "Open Source" which became a thing for me since then to the point it earned me an opportunity to work on the project called "Hearts ❤️ (a recognition tool for open source)" where I have just gathered some how-it-should-be-done product building experience. Prior to this (in my past) I had always built stuffs differently, (yea, a not-so-good kind of different 😂); So with my experience working on "Hearts ❤️", I set out to build something (not just anything) in the how-it-should-be-done way ☝🏾.

About jargons.dev

See, I'm an idealistic (that wasn't supposed to sound bad 🫣) person, I just get the weirdest ideas, which typically comes from a place of needing to scratch an itch and I surely do well to write these ideas down.

So jargons.dev (aka DevJargons) is an idea that came from the perspective of a dude called "Ola" (I can't promise you that's not me 😉); Ola is a super dumb learner who's mostly caught-up in a Technical Jargons hell; when Ola tries to learn/get definition to a technical term, he gets met by another term within, that requires definition and another and another. It's also not very easy to google search this terms especially because some of these terms likely shares context with fields/industries other than tech or software engineering. jargons.dev was just going to scratch this itch by being that one-stop dictionary that offers clear, easy-to-understand definitions to these terms.

The Initial Commit

Hold-up, we cannot go further without talking about "the notepad"

The Notepad

What about this!? Yea, this is one of my oldest Notepad where I write these weird ideas. Sometime in november 2023, I wrote the tweet below, it was "the Notepad" posing with a work laptop (a Microsoft Surface Laptop 2) I had just got as tiny upgrade from my 6years old Lenovo IdeaPad 100.

So yea, this Laptop was super fast and I was pumped, I just wanna build stuffs. Hence, I picked the smallest and easiest to work on idea from the notepad; that was jargons.dev. I started cooking right away and its imperative to state that I started to do it in the how-it-should-be-done way.

Approaching the initial commit

I stated that it was important for me to do this in the how-it-should-be-done way, so I leveraged my experience working on hearts by starting with developing a system architecture and a concept note for how the project would work.

Concept Note and System Architecture: https://persistent-lan-c5e.notion.site/dictionry-a12ac63f23a645a9b2275d829adbae25

At this point for jargons.dev, I had muted that it will be an Open Source dictionary that can accept word contribution, it will not require a server, it will rely on GitHub as backend, using a bunch of md files similar to The Odin Project and doc sites implemented like Nextra (this was infact my knight in shiny armor, I was looking to build jargons.dev with Nextra) but I also want to make contributing to the dictionary fun, and lovable with a streamlined contribution experience.

Having worked (for 2 months already) on "Hearts" at that point where I've consumed the GitHub APIs heavily, I found that I could leverage some GitHub endpoints to create a "wiki"-like experience 🤔 by providing a UI where contributors can add new or edit existing word on the dictionary which ends up as a Pull request — a contribution to Open Source, without interfacing with the GitHub UI or any IDE for word contribution.

The Commit

Now I understood the assignment and I got to work, I initialized the repository under the initial name "dictionry", a name that was initially a typo but stuck with me...

https://github.com/jargonsdev/jargons.dev/commit/8dc21f0fb6036563f826199ea39490bf77c4b34d

...and I merged the first PR to add octokit as the first node module to the project...