👷🏻 Work Reports for 2025

[KennedyRichard]

Hello, everyone,

As the number of people supporting the project increases, specially since there are different services/methods by which people can do it, we need a centralized spot where I can report my work periodically. This way I can be transparent with both the supporters and the community that follows/engages with the project.

Thus, every year, I'll create a post like this one where I'll gather all my work reports for that year. Bellow I'll post replies summarizing my work each month or couple of months. Feel free to comment as well if you have feedback/concerns/constructive criticism about how I manage my time and effort.

[KennedyRichard]

January/February report

As usual (and announced in advance), I took a 2-weeks break at the turn of the year, getting back to work on the project after the first week of January. Here's how I invested my time and effort in the rest of January and the whole month of February.

Discussing/working on the myappmaker's design

Since the beginning of January, I've been involved in discussing the design of myappmaker (working title of our app builder project) on the discussion tab of its repository. Here's the link to my first reply of the year: IndieSmiths/myappmaker-sdd#1 (reply in thread)

Researching Haskell's type system

In addition to that, regarding the Nodezator (our node editor project), I've been researching Haskell's type system, as explained in this reply, in other to better understand many typing tools/concepts available in the mypy static checker, since typing is much more than simply adding type hints to callables. This is an ongoing research.

Development and release of myappmaker's first version (MVP)

From the end of January until the first few days of March I've been working on the first MVP version of myappmaker. I finally managed to release it this Sunday (March 2nd), which you can find here: https://github.com/IndieSmiths/myappmaker

Drawing recognition for widget insertion (feature) in myappmaker:

A much more detailed explanation of the MVP and the work I did for its implementation can be found on this discussion: IndieSmiths/myappmaker#1

The drawing recognition solution we develop for it is specially useful for the whole Indie Smiths project, as it can be used in other apps as well. For instance, I intend to explore its usefulness for inserting nodes in Nodezator and for inserting assets in a level in my in-house level editor (which will be released to the public domain as well).

As I mention repeatedly, I like the commits on the main branch as clean as possible. Because of that, I usually squash my commits before merging them. However, for the sake of transparency, I'll also keep a copy of such commits available in the original branch after squashing and merging them with main. This way you can inspect my work in detail as needed. Here's the branch holding the original commits for my work on the MVP during this period: https://github.com/IndieSmiths/myappmaker/tree/feat/drawrec00 (the feat/drawrec00 branch). Such branch will be kept there for a couple months before being deleted.

Work on the Bionic Blue game

Finally managed to get back on my work on the Bionic Blue game as well. Here's the branch containing my recent commits (on top of old ones from previous work that were not merged yet): https://github.com/IndieSmiths/bionic-blue/tree/feat/optionsscreen00 By the time you read this such commits may be merged already, but they will stil be available there for a couple months.

As announced in our plans for the Indie Smiths project in 2025, I intend to launch the first level still at the beginning of this year, hopefully at the beginning of April.

Social media work

We had a couple of popular posts on social media mentioning Nodezator: this one on Twitter/X and this one on Threads. The one from Twitter/X even resulted in Nodezator being featured on this 80.lv article: https://80.lv/articles/this-might-be-the-cutest-way-to-visualize-python-node-editor-connections/

This kind of attention is very, very welcome! However, it does require extra time to deal with all the engagement it generates. Replying questions that people ask on the posts, the newcomers visiting the Discord server or interacting on GitHub for the first time, etc. That's why this is also part of the report.

A popular post like the one on Twitter/X may even take up as much time as an entire week to answer the interactions it generates. Of course, I can never answer to every single interaction, but I like to reply to as many as possible. Also, even when replying to such iterations, I do work on other stuff of the project as well. It just that such posts do take a lot of my time when they pop up. Naturally, as the project and its apps/games get widely known, I'll only be able to reply to a few interactions, but I'd still have to at least focus on the most important/urgent ones and it would still take some time, since we expect more of this kind of posts to appear from time to time.

Just keep in mind that this sort of public relations and user support are part of the work. I do like to interact with users/followers or just people interested in the project. It also provides many ideas/insights on the project, since people often voice their opinions/praise/concerns, etc.

Project management work

Although it didn't take much of my time, this March 1st we also renamed the project from Indie Python to Indie Smiths. Some work was involved though, like writing about it/answering to people's suggestions/concerns and gathering name suggestions for the pool. The ongoing work of updating all accounts/services/URLs/content that use the old name is also taking some time.