The Fruits of Persistence

I mentioned in my last post that these last few weeks have been amazingly productive on the Accompl.sh front. In fact, I got so “in the zone” with what I was working on last night that I ended up pulling an all-nighter.

Lately I’ve found myself experimenting a lot more with what I’ve been building – trying to develop more efficiently, building things that aren’t necessarily needed but are nifty and challenge me to try stuff that’s outside of the usual features and functions.

I’ve been having so much fun just seeing if I can actually implement a lot of the random ideas I have. They’ve taken a few hours out of my afternoon, but by the end I am so ridiculously happy with actually building something that I didn’t think I could.

Take these goal placards (still haven’t come up with a good name for them) that I added to the site a few days ago. I’ve wanted to create some sort of shareable image for each goal so that people could pin them, tumble them, tweet them, whatever, but I figured it’d be way too complicated and not worth my time. After getting a great tip from Kastner to check out GD Library, I spent a few hours one afternoon putting these together.

It starts out simple: Let me put some text on background and save that as an image. That grows into “OK, I need to deal with multi-line text.” Which turns into “Crap, what about long words?” And, finally, “Oh, you know, I should probably put a logo on these! How do I put an image on an image?”

Each time I get a little better at it and it’s slightly less frustrating.

I think I’ve finally reached a point where I can have an idea and just set about building it instead of being intimated by whether I can actually do it. It’s an amazing feeling.

Coding is actually fun for me now. Maybe it’s that I’m coding something I really care about. Maybe it’s that I need to up my game and try to build things that are more complicated, but for the first time I feel completely literate – like I’m just waving my hands over the keyboard and the code comes out without having to think about it.

So that got me thinking: Where does the Accompl.sh codebase stand right now?
I ran sloccount to find out:

Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
php: 33801 (99.25%)
xml: 159 (0.47%)
python: 95 (0.28%)

Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 34,055
Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 1,097,568
(average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).

34,000 lines of code.

I found an old sloccount output from the end of October 2011. According to that I’ve written about 10,000 lines of code since I left Etsy. That’s not even counting all of the terrible and redundant code that I’ve deleted in the last few months. Even discounting the few libraries I have on the server (to hook up to things like AWS and SendGrid plus some JS/jQuery things), it means I’ve written about 30,000 lines of code over the last 2-ish years.

Granted, I have no idea how this compares to other web apps, and the number of lines of code != a great app, product, etc, but those 30,000 lines of code have finally gotten me to a place where I feel like I actually may know what I’m doing. Maybe.

(P.S. Want a sneak peek at another one of my experiments? Check out the visual list page.)