After a summer of friends, good chats, many book recommendations, and no money, I wondered what it would be like to try and increase book sharing with people I already knew. In the process getting to know friends better, relaxing well, and saving time and money. That’s what sparked the project that I’ve called Openshelf.

Openshelf is a project I kicked off in 2016 as a way to solve a small problem I had in my everyday life. I loved the idea that a side effect of it could be to help me to get to know my friends even better. There’s a special window into someone’s life when you learn about what they read. Anyway, I didn’t get far into it as I started full-time work much sooner than I had expected after a generous offer from CV to become a junior software engineer after only one semester at uni. That experience was great and I ended up staying with them for 6.5 years and finished my degree part-time on the side.

Which brings me to the present. My degree is done. I’ve left CV. Moved back to Melbourne. And I got married in October last year to Bella (if anyone is looking for an animator who cares deeply about colours and shapes and the feelings that come through motion, reach out to her). It’s been super exciting and I’ve loved it. Melbourne feels so full of potential for both of us but the job hunt has been brutal. We’re so many job applications deep but have yet to land an interview with any companies themselves. Initial chats with recruiters don’t count. It’s been a humbling experience and I’ve learned that there’s a lot I don’t know; even more that I’d originally thought.

Which brings me back to Openshelf. I’ve always learned best through doing, and software development is no exception. I don’t think there’s many other industries where I can build things from home using the same tools that multi-billion dollar organisations do. I needed to sharpen my skills and a project to do it on. Openshelf hasn’t seen any love since 2017 so I thought I’d pick it back up, helped along by the encouragement of my friend. It’s a problem space I’ve already thought a lot about which means the intricacies of the problem won’t trip my up as something I haven’t thought through as well. Plus it would be great to see something a little more usable come together now that I’ve got the time to work on it.

I’m taking a slightly different approach to my original one. I’m focussing on recording the books we share with others and then completely forget about and wonder 2 years later where it went. It’ll have some other basic features of my original idea but nothing too fancy.

My friend Eden has been a huge encouragement in this. He’s recommended picking a tech stack and running with it. JavaScript and React is the stack I know best so that’s what I’ve chosen. And for good measure I’m going to over-engineer it using AWS Lambda to give myself the learning experience of using AWS services. One of the other things I’m already learning since picking it back up include the immense amount of (unsurprising) change in React and the tooling around it (Vite anyone?), state management in particular has some cool new methods that make it so much easier.

That’s all for now. But I’m hoping to make this more of a regular thing. I want to write more technically about what I’m learning too. It’ll help me remember it and come back to it later. And there’s a very slim chance it might help someone else too.

If what I’m doing sounds interesting and you want a software developer like me on your team, please reach out to the email address below.