To begin my experience as a software developer I wanted to take the time to create something that was something a bit unusual from the standard norm of programming projects. Building something that could at least be used in a practical sense even after the project was finished. jsfetch was that idea, jsfetch is a clone of neofetch written in JavaScript with NodeJS.
The idea
jsfetch isn’t a brand new idea by any means, there are plenty of similar programs. But I didn’t see any specifically written in JavaScript. Now JavaScript wouldn’t necessarily be the best idea for a cli based tool in a practical sense but it still gets the job done. jsfetch is designed to get simple information from the computer and display it in the terminal in a colorful and fun manner. Now I didn’t want to have the entire project just be me working on it until I was personally satisfied, I feel that would have been counterproductive as a self taught dev because theres always and I mean always cases new devs will never think of because they simply haven’t encountered it before, but that doesn’t mean their ability is any less just un-honed. For this reason I decided to open source the project and take it upon myself to find a team of amazing people who were at the same skill level to benefit from working together.
Issues
- A lot of the initial issues were about how to specifically get the program to actually do what I wanted it to do, its easy to form an idea but its hard to make that idea a reality.
- I wanted to find a team of like minded people to try and make the project a collaborative effort.
- Once I had people join the project I needed to learn how to manage a small team of developers and hand out tasks for each individual member to work on.
- Learning proper github etiquette when it comes to teams and working with them.
- Learning how to upload a program to npm.
The Program
At time of writing jsfetch currently supports 3 major systems, custom color options and provides simple information to its users. Its far from finished but what project is?
When running jsfetch the user gets greeted with a ascii picture of their operating system and then several pieces of information of the system all displayed in a clean manner. Different information is displayed for different systems as well as allowing the user to select from selecting some custom colors when running the program.
The Journey
From the get go jsfetch was designed not to be a production ready program but rather a learning project for several like minded beginners to learn together. When we all collectively agreed that the project had ended we all felt like we came away better programmers because of this project. We all collectively learned something new weather it was about JavaScript or git/Github.
Jsfetch is still freely available to download, if you wish to try it out please feel free to do so at Github or npm.