- Sleep 7h+ each night (you think you don't need it - but you do!)
- drink NO coffee (you've slept enough!)
- pair-up (you're not as good as you think)
- get a grasp on the problem (it's time will spent!)
- communicate constantly (you're not alonw especially)
- refactor just as much
- learn from you partner
- celebrate even small accomplishments (you need success!)
- go home and do something else (your pet project does not need more than 5hrs per week!)
- repeat (because repetition makes perfection!)

A man goes inside a pet shop and starts to move around the cages to scout the pets. He sees a monkey with a price of 5000$ and goes to the merchant to ask for details. Hey mister, the monkey…what does it know to worth that much money? Well, it knows Windows 95, 98, 2000, and also knows Word, C++, Visual Basic and last but not least, it knows how to play computer games. - Good monkey, it's worth the money. He goes and finds another monkey with a price of 10000$ and again he will ask the merchant. "What does this monkey know?" "It knows Linux, Unix, Corel and Autocad." "Nice, even I don't know those things." On a last scout run he finds another monkey just sitting there with a price 20000$. The story repeats, and he goes with a lack of confidence to ask the merchant for details. "And what does this monkey do for that ridiculous amount of money?" "I never saw her doing anything, but the other two call her Project Manager!"

I am so fucking jealous of all you assholes. Oh look at me, i am a full stack developer and yada yada. I have the time and patience to do whatever app or game i want and show it off.

Fuck, you.

If i get home, i am glad i can stay awake for dinner and play a little game before i go to bed and my next day starts.

I have ideas, i need to do some self study to get all parts of those ideas going, but i fucking can't.

I have no motivation and no energy to spend when i get home, and even the weekends rarely i will feel like proframming jack shit. When or how do you even do it?! It's driving me up the wall and it makes me feel useless.

Stop being better then me in every possible way!

Want to work on a pet project, but gf demands all of my time. So, I work at nights. Then I get bitched at why I'm always tired and don't want to do anything -.-

My boss back in 2013 asked me to figure out why he was getting birthday notifications from his pet social media project almost a week early. It turns out the previous developers had written their own date library in which every month had exactly 30 days, leading to a year that was 5–6 days short of what it should have been. Apparently those morons didn’t know that some months have a different number of days than others. Or that leap years are a thing. Or that there’s a standard library full of tried-and-true functions that handle these kinds of things for you.

That empty feeling when a project is about to be completed...like you have to give away a pet you've grown attached to...

That nice feeling in a cold morning of booting up your code editor / ide of choice and making a brand spanking new prototype project with a language you love. All accompanied by your hot beverage of choice, a warm blanket, and a pet or two.

My PC died 2 weeks ago. I've been stuck on mobile since and will be too broke for a new machine for an indefinite (though certainly not infinite) period.

It's hell. One can only read so many ebooks and meditate so much.

What's the longest you've ever been without your machine, unwillingly?

Worst part is I was just starting a pet project and now it's on hold!

Pic related, my feels as time drags on when I'm not at work.

Happily agree to help colleague with 'a quick problem' on their pet project. Realise a few seconds in that they can't actually see a difference between JS and JSON.

When I saw an O(1) algorithm solution. I was so amazed that I got goosebump. Still wondering how one is able to come up with such algorithm.

Another times when I understand how the whole thing works in a project. This class is doing this, that class is doing that, this file contains the configuration, etc. Its like everything is connected.

Other times when you see your pet project start to take shape. You just want to cuddle it.

Other than being an a**hole, Linus. Guy changed computing as we know it with a little pet project

Today boss called me on my personal phone to ask where the fuck I am after not answering a low prio mail for 10 minutes from his pet project.

We have voip.
We have chat.

No pressure meant...

Should learn not to get my hopes up.. being a good dev doesn't mean you do marketing well :'(

$category = 'Story';

Holy shit it finally worked I finally got a private server up and running for an old game, after countless forum posts and broken links (note the form isn't that active anymore since 2010)

After finding a working server source you also need a client with the same version

Even though this was a pet project, it feels good to finally complete it. I might even try to build some custom stuff into it

I think I know now where "Pet project" got its name from: 1) Most of us would rather play with it all day instead of going to work. 2) As it grow bigger, eventually you'll have to shed out a couple bucks for it, and.. 3) Your PM would be FURIOUS if he caught you playing with it at the office.

Lessons I've learnt so far on programming

-- Your best written code today can be your worst tomorrow (Focus more on optimisation than style).
-- Having zero knowledge of a language then watching video tutorials is like purchasing an arsenal before knowing what a gun is (Read the docs instead).
-- It's works on my machine! Yes, because you built on Lenovo G-force but never considered the testers running on Intel Pentium 0.001 (Always consider low end devices).
-- "Programming" is you telling a story and without adding "comments" you just wrote a whole novel having no punctuation marks (Always add comments, you will thank yourself later for it I promise).
-- In programming there is nothing like "done"! You only have "in progress" or "abandoned" (Deploy progressively).
-- If at this point you still don't know how to make an asynchronous call in your favourite language, then you are still a rookie! take that from me. (Asynchronous operation is a key feature in programming that every coder should know).
-- If it's more than two conditions use "Switch... case" else stick with "If... else" (Readability should never be under-rated).
-- Code editors can MAKE YOU and BREAK YOU. They have great impact on your coding style and delivery time (Choose editors wisely).
-- Always resist the temptation of writing the whole project from scratch unless needs be (Favor patching to re-creation).
-- Helper methods reduces code redundancy by a large chunk (Always have a class in your project with helper methods).
-- There is something called git (Always make backups).
-- If you don't feel the soothing joy that comes in fixing a bug then "programming" is a no-no (Coding is fun only when it works).
-- Get angry with the bugs not the testers they're only noble messengers (Bugs are your true enemy).
-- You would learn more than a lot reading the codes of others and I mean a lot! (Code review promotes optimisation and let's you know when you are writing macaroni).
-- If you can do it without a framework you have yourself a big fat plus (Frameworks make you entirely dependent).
-- Treat your code like your pet, stop taking care of it and it dies! (Codes are fragile and needs regular updates to stay relevant).

Programming is nothing but fun and I've learnt that a long time ago.

ARGH the next person to tell me how X is the best toolchain is getting their fucking head cut off! Holy fucking shit, this is even more annoying than the whole IDE debate. At least with IDEs everyone has a favourite one and they hate others accordingly, with build toolchains there's always a huge group of fucktards sucking each other's dick by adding new features, and they're always too busy wanking their sparkling features for small projects to realise how fucking inefficient their polished dings and dongs are for any bigger job.

For the millionth time, no, we're not switching to this popular toolchain just because it gave you a blowjob with your pet project (although that would indeed be a tempting offer), so stop talking how fast and flexible it is. Until you can show how it compiles a 500 MB project faster than our current setup, I don't give a shit how many people jerk on that nookie.

Made an Android app a while ago. I needed some pet project so I decided to go with Java for Android. First time, no experience at all.

So everything went ok, I had a little help from a colleague, structuring code, and pushing to the store. Work done app was doing ok.

A year later I came back to this project. I needed to fix a bug - date time and daylight savings crap. 😥

Spent a week on it. Ready to push a new version to the store, with some extra features! Build apk. All good.

Wait. I need to sign the APK? Wtf. I had to format my hard drive. How do I recover my fucking certificate?

*Google's for a while*

No fucking way. I can't restore the certificate. Or get the keystore back. The solution is to create a new app with a brand new package name?

Thanks for nothing, I'm done with Android development.

Childish thing really, and slightly related to my current job

Was working on a small pet project (it was a website really) back in college, and collaborating with another friend on it who lived in a different city. Had to show him my progress but he wasn't a programmer, just had to show him how much front end part is done and the functionalities till that time. Of course hosting it online was the best solution, but I was a student and broke.

So I got this python script caller pagekite which would make my laptop into a server for the duration I run the script. It ran but I couldn't manage to show him the site for days since I didn't know where it was connecting to. (No one had any docs on it back then)

Did some tinkering and saw that it connects to localhost, so I fired up my xampp server and it worked as I wanted it to :')

Since that day, I decided that I want to be a developer and learn and implement more of such things.
Moral: the smallest, insignificant things can sometimes give you the most happiness.

I don't want to work on the project at my job anymore. It's an over engineered piece of shit.

I work on my pet project at home, but only for about 20 minutes at a time. After that, I feel the need to walk away and waste my time with other non-productive activities.

How do I get my love for development back? Has the corporate world killed it?

What you could have:
- simple project structure
- common lib with modular logic
- import logic as needed in you services

What you do:
- waste months to write an opinionated framework that works only if used in a super specific way
- have a fat sample project as example
- use a code generator to copy and rename the said sample project whenever you create a new service
- have everything break whenever something new is added in the framework
- oh and keep the framework in active development while others work on the client services, so lots of things will break often and out of nowhere

Fucking god, i hate when people make pet projects out of work projects

Biggest pet peeve is when someone develops a shitty project using XYZ technology/language and a tutorial and they somehow think they know XYZ and all of it's intricacies and are an expert dev in XYZ. 😐😐😐. No you fucking know how to follow a tutorial and you have a small understanding of XYZ. End rant.

A year ago I was hired as a Jr dev to assist the senior dev because he was so busy. Within 2 months he was pushed out and I replaced him. I thought maybe he just got busy with other things or found a new job.

After working alone this past year, I was told last week that since I am so busy with things outside the job, they were hiring someone to help me finish the project I'm currently on.

(for context : I work as a contracted dev for a small dev company of 5 or so people. One for each language/os.)

I can't help but think that I'm probably being pushed out and replaced. I flat out asked that, but never got a reply. Now I'm 70% through a project and disgruntled with everything. Not sure how I'm supposed to feel really.

If they want to replace me for one reason or another that's fine, I just wish they weren't shady about it.

I should probably be working right now, but I'm going to take my kids to the pet store to clear my head. I'll enjoy a little time away from my computer.

Multiple all-nighters (all day every day):

1) Working, studying and developing an Android game as pet project. Last few weeks before release (yup, I've set a deadline for a pet project) my day consisted of uni, work, more work and 4-5h sleep.

2) Having worked on my thesis (Development of a CPU/SoC + Firmware + Linux kernel) and actual paid work. In parallel. Because, you know, I need to eat and pay rent and shit while I'm writing the thesis. And debts at that moment were not an option (still made some). All-day all-night all-week. After submitting the thesis I went to the doc and enjoyed 2 weeks of doing nothing.

3) Sometimes on my main open-source project after regular work hours. If I have the motivation and ideas that I want to check out or prove it gets late/early too fast.

I am writing a UI api for microcontrollers as a pet project.
I usually follow kernel.org for coding style so visited the site to see if there are any changes, these docs are so funny

I made Skype Bot which queries the data using wsdl authentication on our ticketing tool and send the data whoever has requested in skype itself(without logging or touching the ticketing tool).

Manager: Is that even possible?

Me: (In excitement) Everything is possible if you have the will.

Now, He wants me to work on his pet project. I dont know how to react!

>end of the work
>me tired and want to go home to pet my cat, dog... and fishes or whatevs
>while shutting down monitors I was asked to help fix the bug
>fml
>ok, though I was not working on that part of the project
>fixing it and feeling proud
>today I got angry messages that it wasn't a bug and I shouldn't have touched it
>the person who asked me to 'fix' it did not understand why it worked in the way it worked (and I fixed it in the way he wanted it to work)
>ffs...
>I guess next time when I feel tired I should just be avoiding helping people
>time to think of prepared excuses

I think the best feeling is seeing you pet project slowly developing and growing.

I think the worst feeling is hearing someone 'meh'-ing while talkingabout it. 😓

- Favourite pastime while waiting for your code to compile
- Most heroic/ingenuous bug fix
- Hardest to track down bug
- Worst legacy code you wrote and left behind leaving a job
- Weirdest project
- Last side project you actually finished
- Explain your job like I'm five/the way you do it for non-tech people
- That time your past self (almost) got you in trouble
- Software pet peeves
- Story about how you freaked someone out
- Feature that most certainly was a bug once
- Post something for your favourite previous weekly tag!

Started working on a per project in Rust (first time using Rust) .. a scripting language.

Rust is great, so fast, compiles in 0.5-1.2seconds on my $200 laptop as well! Pretty rare for safety, speed, AND compile speed to exist in one beautiful language.

Also my scripting language is the opposite of beautiful. Oh God.

I can't remember the last time I had THIS MUCH FUN developing an Android app! 😳 Have a paper due, but learning RN is actually making this pet project a huge distraction! 😳 This is a whole new world of mobile development 😆, but what if another framework takes it's place 😵. But there's still people who know Angular, and that's widely used...right 😓 and moble dev has never been this easy, so maybe it'll stick around like Node...

who cares... I'M FUCKING LOVING React Native now!!! 😆

The best happened today.

These past 2 weeks have been shit. People wronged me big time, got thrown under the bus for shit that the people behind refused to own up to it. Took that shit because I just couldn't be bothered to fucking argue.

I'm the only dev on this project and we're so close to release so I bit my tongue and took it on the chin but it's been eating me alive since then.

The tipping point was yesterday. 5 people failed to communicate shit properly amongst themselves on all channels got me forced to be the last one finishing work yesterday 4 hours after everyone left. I had every right to refuse and leave on time but again, we're so close to release and I don't want to see this project fail.

But see, I got angry. So fucking angry that nothing else has been on my mind since yesterday.

I don't take out my anger at others, that's not who I am (moslty) so today I was at work and secluded myself from everyone else otherwise I would've exploded in someone's face.

I was also supposed to meet up with friends tonight but with all this shit going on I decided not to go because I would not have been fun to be around.

Left work on time today, fell asleep on the train because I am too exhausted.

When I was about to walk into my house I noticed this little super cute puppy following me. I had no idea where or how long he's been behind me as I was walking home but he seemed way too happy when I saw him. His tail wagging like he's excited to see me even though I have never seen him. I petted him, played a bit with him. He seemed to be the happiest dog ever 😁. He managed to put a smile on my face for the first time in the last few days.

He then ran away.. I guess he got bored 😅

I am feeling so much better now all because of this little puppy 🐶. I'm so glad I ran into him because I've been smiling since then.

I wish I had took a picture of him 😥

Doggo, you probably won't read this, but thanks mate you made my month in those few minutes 🤘

If you have a dog, go pet him and appreciate how much happiness they bring in your life. If you have a cat.. Uhh I don't know... Uhh pray it doesn't kill you in your sleep I guess?

Thanks for reading

Finished all pending dev jobs for today. I guess Friday could be a pet project day.

I am able to work 15 hours on my pet project then take a short walk outside and feel like a balanced man, but even just an hour on a commercial project is a massive effort even though the code is clean, the stack is modern, I'm good friends with the client and I also like the concept. The mere fact that I'm doing it for money takes the fun out of it.

Note: I posted this as a comment, but figured it could be a rant on its own.

I absolutely hate what frameworks like Bootstrap did for the web. True, 10 or 20 years ago quick personal / pet project sites looked plain and boring, and only sites with dedicated developers had a nice layout. But what did Bootstrap bring? Those "minimal effort" sites still look boring as fuck, except now they have Bootstrap look & feel. What's even worse is that thanks to Bootstrap, every fucking UI kit is just Bootstrap with more bloat. To further prove my point, if you google "material CSS" you'll find a ton of projects, and except for the official Google projects, they all look & feel like a mutilated incest child of Bootstrap and MD because instead of making their own implementations, everyone just started with Bootstrap. And the same goes for all sorts of templates which look & feel nothing like Bootstrap, but thanks to its shitty influence devs still start with Bootstrap instead of writing clean CSS which does what a template needs without extra bloat.

I'd love to start a pet project, but my brain refuses to come up with an idea. 😑
At least I'm used to it, seems like my creativity is not existent.

It's always a great feeling when a solution you made for a pet project last night turns out to be exactly what you need for issues that arose today.

Pet peeve: the claim that static typing prevents errors.

Today I worked on a C# project that's a mess of nulls, side-effects, inferences, and race conditions. Then I went back to a JS project that's twice the size but written in a clean, well-tested, FP style and currently has fewer than 10 issues logged.

Look, I get that there are upsides to static typing, and I'm open to introducing typescript or flow for our JS code.

I just can't stand the faux-concern from the static typing dingleberries when they are the ones who produce these horrendous lumps of unmaintainable shit, and the JS/Python/Ruby/etc people are over here quietly reinventing functional programming and code modularity.

Finish my only pet project;
Learn a new compiled language;
Get better at functional programming;
Read more books about networks and software engineering;

Same sh*t different day. Let me play with my pet project! I know it does not earn me anything, but hey it will make millions in the future once it's done! I am sure! :D

I have already started the process of a side project by desiging the software, the architecture, the 3d model, ordered all the electronics of a pet 'smart' stable for my guinea pigs.

Which would automatically feed them and refill their water tanks silently but for me the point on playing around with dozens of sensors for like different water levels, water quality, hay, temperature, water quality (you get the point) ... Building a nice looking web interface or an App to control everything and get a live feed from different angles ( sounds a bit crazy altogether but it looked like a cool project )

I even started a instructable and had a github repo for sharing the source of the app/web interface and the whole micro service based server

I'm still at it and hopefully will start to build the ***ing wood and acrylic parts in the next month's but currently and for the last month's free time ist my archenemy

Keep you posted if you are interested 😀

I find myself faced with a morel dillema. Do I work on a pet project of mine and finally get some leadway or play overwatch?

Well i managed to finish a pet project after a very very long time while drunk coding for the first time. Def gonna do it again 12/10

!rant
For people who actually finished or published their pet projects.

How do you plan it?
Time wise, and setting project limits.

Have you ever been in that situation where you really wanted to start a pet project, but you didn’t have the energy to do it after work, but in the same time you didn’t want to work on your project you have been assigned to at your job, so you slacked all day because you didn’t have the guts to work on your pet project at your job? I’m pathetic.

Programmer looking for a new language

I have been a JavaScript developer for a few years now (non professionally) and I really like the language. I mainly program for execution with NodeJS rather than web, because I feel like I get more freedom (e.i. the ability to use a computer file system).

I normally never use other people's libraries and instead either write my own library/ies for the specific task or use an old one. I only ever use someone else’s if I need a quick frame work to test an idea, never for something I will actually use.
I prefer to work object / class orientated.

I have worked on distributed servers with NodeJS before, however trying to distribute a load across one computer across it's multiple threads has proved problematic due to the heavy delays of standard io transfer speeds.

Why do I want to switch?:
•Because JavaScript is not at all created with multithreading in mind, and pretty much any multithreading solution is a bodge and allot of the time it is more efficient to work single threaded.
•Also, I get the sense that JavaScript + NodeJS is not used often in the programming industry comparison to other languages like; ruby, python, and I don't want to get stuck in a nesh language of which would decrease my employment chances heavy.

Side Note: I have been working on a pet project to have a distributed database (made with nodejs), and so far, there are no language specific problems, but I feel like it would be more efficient if I used a programming language designed more to cater for multi threading.

Family is out of country. Im getting 6 days off because of religious holidays. I think 6 days would be enough to jump start my new pet project. Bring it on!

Im creating a "settings" functionality of sorts, unique per "account"

Ideally I'd create a new table, FK it with the Accs table with each Setting variable being a column

But im also inclined to just turn it into a JSON and not bother with N columns for it specially since arrays are involved in the settings

Could version it to ensure that if Settings change on code-level, old accs with old settings dont get fucked up

Now this is a pet project so im free to experiment, not bound by high level design documents

What do y'all prefer/recommend? JSON<->Settings Obj or plain old Table/column with FKs

Make good progress on Orchid, my pet project, the functional programming language that has no syntax apart from what the macros define. A type system, an interpreter and provisions for a compiler would be nice for a start.

Finish my bachelor's degree on some unspecified part of Orchid, at the current pace that would most likely be just the Hindley-Milner algorithm.

Don't get fired from the gem of a job I have, and move to London because I'm a city rat and the only way I can sleep well apparently is with a tram or drunken people screaming under my window.

When sales throws you under a bus because you never answer emails promptly about their pet project, yet multiple emails to them asking for a specification for that project go unanswered. When I mentioned the multiple emails the vp of company advised that they do not have the time for trivial stuff such as emails.

I am currently weeks apart from releasing my pet project, which I am working on for almost 6 years now. Of course, there were a few stops here and there, but overall I've spent a lot of time and effort on this to make it work. It is far from complete but I am really happy with the results.

Now, since I am not a professional by any means - it is all a hobby for me - I was wondering, that how much my work would cost, if it were to made by professionals. Below the details so you can get a grasp of the thing.

The whole system is for our family business. We are selling parts for an old-timer truck model. The website was pretty much done already, people like it, it only needed some polishing and adding of the new features. But the thing behind it is monstrous (at least for me).
Apart from the custom-made CMS for the website (most of it was done already and didn't need to change), we can handle orders, partners, prices, stocks, overdue partners, pretty much anything a CRM would do.
There is a logic to automatically make orders based on import prices, or give the customer a custom discount based on the price gap of each product. There are products, which can contain other products, and their prices are dynamically changed based on a given formula, once an underlying product price changes. We can send e-mails when an order status changes, and there is also a page, where a user can interact whit their order, like changing the shipping or the delivery address. The system is (or will in the following weeks) also connected to multiple shipping companies' API, so we can order deliveries and print labels directly from our system. The whole thing is a custom made Laravel project by the way. There are countless more features, but I've just spent 2 hours explaining all to my father and was only be able to cover like half of it.

And why it is all custom made, you ask? Well, the business logic is a bit twisted, so it would be hard to operate as a regular web shop, since the availability of the products are uncertain, given the fact that it is a model, which isn't manufactured in 30 years. So, we can't just accept and send orders without confirming. It is also a thing, that people usually don't know what they need to order for their truck, so we have to help them, so they don't waste their money and the precious last pieces of a part unnecessarily.

Sorry for this rather long post, and it might feel like I just want to brag (well, I kinda do), but I am honestly interested in what such a custom product would cost in the market.

Thank you for your time answering.

I know some of y'all will judge the fuck outa me
But I had a "I've no idea how this works, but it works" moment today on a pet-project...

It's so inefficiently made coz I was frustrated by it failing so thought il let it work first then worry about shrink-wrapping the logic

Yet with NO-CACHE, from DB -> Service/API -> HTTP response, is just 350ms...
WITH In-memory Cache it goes down to 40-50ms...

Tech and product teams have to be aligned. If not, there’s chaos where dev teams suffer. No skunk project(s), no adhoc project(s), No special or pet projects for the CTO or Product Manager. Figure out what needs to get done, plan a road map, plan milestones to get there, consider the folks who ACTUALLY does the work. Protect your teams work-life balance.

If you don't have a pet project that brings you money, you're a failure.

This rule only applies to me.

How do y'all approach media-endpoints?
Specially publicly accessible user-uploaded media

Rn I encrypt the path to the media-
/file and expose it, decrypt on the server (returning a relative file-path) which then fetches the file via File.Read and returns it as-is

I put a cache header and works fine

But something in the back of my mind makes me feel it isnt right

Like, normal endpoints and file-read endpoints shouldnt be in the same backend, potentially affecting each other

But since it's just a fun pet project so Im not paying for a 2nd baremetal server as a CDN/media server -.-

Worst case scenario I use it as-is, but would appreciate hearing other approaches

Our pet project rocks, but it get 0 revenue, so we can spent almost no time on it 😢

Do you guys have people in your office that just REFUSE to cooperate, or people who tell you they'll cooperate, but then they literally do anything except for cooperate?

I'm having trouble with the latter; I've been trying to get one of our less experienced members to work on our deployment. He's successfully configured at least 4 other deployments, and this one is the EXACT SAME as the other ones. The issue is that the person who is im control of this particular master console is someone higher up than me, but they don't know how to delegate. Thus everything that they touch becomes their own little pet project that no one else can dare touch, because they'll "mess it up" (not do it the right way according to his limited bible of best practices).

So now I'm stuck here, trying to convince HIS BOSS to get him access, but i even HE cant get him to do it! Now I'm sitting here waiting, getting more and more fed up with this guy, because like i said, it's his MO: im on two other projects with him, and they're all moving at a GLACIER'S pace.

Seriously, if you dont have the time for a project, but it on the backburner, dont start it and make your other projects suffer.

When you ask a question on HN, hoping it will become one of those awesome resources for learning new stuff to use in your small pet project, and it only gets 2 votes and just sits there for the past 3 days...

I want to finally implement a minor pet project I spent some time designing a while ago. It's a web service based on encrypted data handling. I'm willing to get out of my comfort zone (that is .NET) and practice the use of different tech. What do you recommend for it?

[Q] I am working on a small pet project for quite some time now, a basic job searching app (main target IT & fellow devs).

I was wondering if any of you guys have any suggestions, problems to fix that are present in platforms which you are/have been using, ideas?

What really grinds your gears when using other websites and what makes you use them?

P.S am not a recruiter, nor am I working for an agency.
*rating recruiters/companies will be there 100%*

next pet project: learn Dart, build CMS in Dart.

When is it a good idea to use linked lists?

In my pet project, I want to have a list of items with an index. The index of an item should be updateable, and the index of the other items should adjust.

A linked list would make it very easy to adjust the order since you just need to update the "next" node of 2 items, but I think this would make getting the index of items more troublesome.

What is the preferred way to do something like this, am I just overthinking it, and would updating all the indices of the items not be such a big job?

The project uses React and mongo (express-mongoose) btw, if that's important.

idk why but personal project code gives me more OCD triggers than work project code.

Can't code for myself anymore. My OCD kicks in and makes me wanna throw up when I look at the shit I coded last week for my pet project.

OK... I give up. I've ranted before about brainstorming myself in a corner with my current pet project. I've known I'm out of my element for a while... Anyone have any tips on how to find a development partner in the node community on a tight budget?

Be agile, practice patterns, read the core literature (GoF, uncle Bob...)
Actually finish a pet project.