I have been looking for a fun side project to work on in my free time. Building projects is the best way to actually improve your skills as a developer. I decided that I will try to document my journey publicly to help share my thoughts and decisions.
What am I going to build?
I have been spending a good amount of time working on my time management. Managing my daily tasks has been something I needed to improve. I currently write down what I plan to do for the day in a notebook. Notebooks are nice but it makes it difficult to organize the tasks besides by date and order. How can I dynamically group them by project, adjust priority as my day changes, roll them over to the next day without having to rewrite them? I decided to create a task manager built into VSCode.
I am sure there are other extensions that already do this but that is not the point. The plan is to use this as a learning experience and build something specifically for me. I get to determine what features are important and how they tie into my workflow.
Problems I am solving
- I spend most of my day with VSCode open on my computer as a Programmer. It would be nice to have all my tasks for my projects in one place.
- I want to have a board similar to Trello where I could easily click and drag to move tasks between statuses and adjust priorities.
- Most of my daily notes are Markdown in a repository. Having the ability to link my notes through wiki links using something like Foam would be a plus.
Thinking through the Tech Stack
The tech stack I plan on using:
- TypeScript
- Vscode's API already uses it.
- ReactJS
- It might be a little overkill but why not.
- Tailwind CSS
- I want to easily be able to style the webview and I love using utility classes for styles.
- Markdown
- I already take my notes in Markdown and it would make it easier integrating with foam.
- GitHub Markdown has a task like syntax I could utilize and then you are not forced to use the extension to manage your tasks.
Top comments (19)
Hi Corey - nice idea, I built something similar a few days ago, curious to see how your Vscode version turns out.
Here’s mine:
dev.to/mjgs/eleventy-blog-template...
Awesome, I'll check it out.
Looking forward to following this! I been wanting to make an extension to show KintoHub related services running in the cloud within VSCode.
ZERO experience on VSCode extensions, so definitely looking forward to this series!
I have zero experience with it also.
It's a learning experience for me. I hope that I help someone else by learning in public.
Looks like a fun project. I've never seen someone build a VS Code extension. This is great.
Yeah, I am pretty excited. I am hoping that sharing this journey might help someone else.
yeah, you are saying right, It helps us
Hi I recently wrote my first extension as well and so put together resources around what I learnt.
Here are some links to docs and sample repos. I also cover some more exporting and publishing
michaelcurrin.github.io/dev-cheats...
I just had an idea to write my first VS Code extension based on my Github hackathon idea, so this is very good timing! :)
Nice, hopefully everything I share can help you with your journey.
This sounds awesome cant wait to see it. I never made an extension before so i'm pumped about this project.
Awesome. I hope everything I share will help you!
Looks like nice plan! Good Luck.
Thank you!
Great! Best of luck.
Thank you! Will be a fun experience.
Add beautifuld dnd from atlassian and you have it done in one day
Thanks, I just looked into it and that package looks like a good fit.
Amazing. Looking forward for the next part of the tutorial. Good Luck :)