The Wardrobe Diaries

I have been working on building a new version of Wardrobe, my little blogging app, and development has stalled as I’ve been swamped with other things. I have thought about it for a few months now and I’ve decided I’m going to do a complete rewrite. Lots of new features have been added to Laravel and with 4.3 on the horizon I think now would be a good time to revisit some of my original goals, and also add new features. Instead of just building it and releasing the finished product I want to do something a little different. I’m going to journal the entire process on this site – from blank screen until completion.

Lately I’ve seen a few “rebuilding” type series and I enjoy these but they typically focus only on the code, I want to take a different direction. Instead of just code I’m going to write about my thoughts and the reasons I’m making the decisions that I am. This is something I haven’t seen done and could be both fun and unique. Or dumb and boring 🙂 I just don’t know and the only way to find out is to “just do it”. My hope is that by doing it this way I’ll get to cover a lot of areas of building an app and also be a good resource for you.

My plan is once I start I’ll create a fresh repo, then each day I work on it I add a new branch. The benefit with that is so the journal entries always have a correct code reference to go along with it. The tricky part is how time consuming the series will be. My initial goal is going to be to work on it one night a week but that could change based on other obligations.

Here is an ongoing list of all the weekly posts:

• Week 1 – Design and Planning
• Week 2 – Styleguide
• Week 3 – Migrations, Repositories, Admin Editor
• Week 4 – Timezones and MomentJS