Programmed to Program

About two months ago, GPT and I wrote a post committing to this blog to start writing more and taking it seriously.  Since then, I have updated Zippdroid to Livewire 3, launched a pretty fancy store with Stripe and Printify integration, and built a dashboard that is ready to compete with WordPress.  Oh right, and I've written 2 blog posts. I see so many benefits to owning a personal blog, however when sitting down to "write", I'll choose code over English any day. This has so much to do with the tools and community around the TALL stack, but building cool things is who I am. I am Programmed to Program.

So, what's the status of the blog?

The content on this blog has never been too serious, and up until this post it has been written entirely by ChatGPT. Some prompts better than others and some revisions a little more focused than others, but the real author here has been AI generated.  It is, however all of my hobbies, some of my photos, and a small glimpse into my private world. 

• I like the idea of the portfolio series and am looking forward to having a place to post some of my work, including some of the older projects that help get me to this point.
• I like the idea of having tutorials, even if they're just for me and used as public process documentation.
• I like the idea of having some recipes and random things that might help me get organized a bit.
• I like the idea of having some affiliates, and shoutouts to products I am using regularly.
• I like the idea of having my own personal production website.
• I don't like writing.

ZippDroid isn't going anywhere! I will continue working on my writing skills, as well as the overall content to eventually make this a credible resource for programmers and a fun website for anyone with like-minded hobbies.

The recent website upgrades:

Livewire 3 is life. Since the early days of my programming career, I have always been a PHP loyalist. It's not always clear these days, but that also means since my early days of programming i've known Javascript. I've been here through Jquery. I was here when "Javascript is disabled" was a thing.  It was a tool just like HTML and CSS, but it was never my focus.  Livewire is the best thing to happen to me since the transition from Zend Framework 2 to Laravel.  That was Livewire 2!

Livewire 3 is on a different level.  Caleb, I too think Livewire is 🔥 and I really appreciate you building it for us. I'm so happy to see it on the Laravel website and right there next to Vue and React.

For those of you that are programmers that haven't checked out the Laravel/Livewire combo, I highly recommend checking out the amazing Laravel Bootcamp, Livewire Edition. For those of you that don't care about the code, click around a bit and you'll just feel it.  Most of the Livewire action on the website is behind a login, as well as the cart, which funny enough are the next 2 things we're talking about.  Am I becoming a better writer already?

The Shop was originally just a distraction from having to write, but it turned into something really awesome. As of today, it has 3 products with a few variations on 1 of them. I have zero inventory, and the entire shop is Print on Demand being powered by Printify. This is not an affiliate, and I haven't even decided if I will stick with them. However, I have ordered all of the products and have been extremely impressed with the quality so far.

So, a ZippDroid/Programmed to Program user that buys something is submitting payment to Stripe, then on approval the product is sent to Printify to print and ship out without any human interaction. Obviously this isn't true today as I'm manually veryifing and approving all orders, but we're getting pretty close to printing money over here.

The Dashboard has been a really cool transformation. When this started I just wanted a place to mess with some Laravel and Breeze and since I've always used WordPress for "basic" blog style or brochure style websites, I figured I'd focus on the CMS side and see what the effort is to ditch it and build my own. I started with small components here and there like TinyMCE, Categories, tags, images, etc.  Then I decided to add a newsletter to the footer.  Then I got started with the shop and all of a sudden has products and orders.  The website was working great but the dashboard was a disaster.  Just when I needed it, I stumbled upon taildashboards.com and feel like a kid in a candy store. I just want to build all of them, but decided to stay focused, grabbed TailAdmin, and started customizing.  A few days and livewire components later and all of a sudden I had a full dashboard to truly compete with the CMS I was using as my go-to for smaller projects.  

Programmed to Program

I can't imagine many people are still reading down here, but if so, you're in for a treat. This post officially starts my focus shift towards a project I've been thinking about for years, Programmed to Program. It's so far from complete, but after some inspiration it's clear I need to to start building in public a little more. Overall, Programmed to Program is in no place to be sharing it, but actually, some of the structure is already in place, and I think users can get an idea for it right away. I hope to build something for programmers of all languages to have a place to share resources and create processes that make sense and are organized for you while programming in that language. An Android mobile app is already in development and actually pretty close to completion. Feel free to sign up and get an idea of how it will work.

During this journey of blog writing, I've re-awoken my passion for coding and building that will compete with my writing. However, this blog is here to stay, evolving alongside my skills and interests. From the power of Livewire 3 to the unexpected success of my online shop, I'm excited to see where this path takes me. And now, with Programmed to Program on the horizon, a project I've long dreamed of, I invite you to join me on this coding adventure.