This is a dev diary of implementing Filerion, a web-based file manager for online storage (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, s3 and more).
Today I implemented basic bookmark management.
When you have lots of folders, you do want a shortcut way of navigating between them:
If the current folder is already bookmarked, we change Bookmark this folder to Remove this folder from bookmarks:
It’s a small, nice touch.
Some time in the far future I’ll probably add a way to manage bookmarks i.e. re-arrange the order. But right there are far more important features to implement.
Lesson: prioritization is important. You need to resist the urge to spend time on features that are not the most important right now.
Black holes in programming
Today I spent over an hour trying to figure out an annoyance in VS Code JavaScript tooling.
The short version: vite supports import of JavaScript as import { foo } from "./bar".
VS Code has a powerful JavaScript tooling that can spot errors and even fix some of them.
One of the fixes is adding imports for missing JavaScript declaration.
The problem was: VS Code would insert import { foo } from "bar". Note: "bar" vs "./bar".
Every time I had to manually fix up the fix.
I finally got so annoyed that I tried to fix it.
I spent a bunch of time reading vite docs, searching Google, trying various things (kind of blindly because if I understood the issue, I would just fix it).
Finally I asked the internet for help. I mean vite community.
And minutes after asking the internet I found something new to try in a GitHub issues that was one of my Google searches.
And it works. I don’t really understand why but I don’t care.
The lesson here is programming often involves falling deep into black holes of trying to fix something.
Sometimes it’s figuring out how to configure VS Code.
Sometimes it’s trying to fix an elusive bug.
Those black holes might consume a surprisingly large amount of time.
