I have dozens projects on my drive that are playgrounds for me to try out things I am learning. Each of them is a simple example of a “type” of project (e.g. a React Native app, a React App, a clojure program, a SwiftUI app, etc). I don’t actively maintain them until I need to use them again.

Two of these playground projects are public: Habits and App-o-Mat.

Habits is my first iOS App. I made it in 2008, and it’s the codebase I have continuously worked on the longest. It always builds in the latest Xcode, and it has both Objective-C and pre-CoreData sqlite code. It also has modern Swift.

App-o-Mat is a content site for iOS and watchOS tutorials, which is made in Django with a simple HTML-heavy front-end. I made it in 2014, and it’s my second longest continuously worked on codebase. I regularly migrate it to the lastest Python and Django (it was originally Python 2 and Django 1.0).

Whenever I want to try out new iOS features, I can usually find a place in Habits to do that. When I want to try out a new CSS framework, App-o-Mat is simple enough to try it out and see if I’d like it, but not too simple.

I started converting App-o-Mat to Tailwind a couple of days ago. I have run into enough edge-cases that I am sure that I am giving Tailwind a good look. I have tried out other CSS frameworks in the past (even just trying to update to the lastest Bootstrap) and it hasn’t gone as well as this is going. Tailwind is different enough that you need to try it on something real, and App-o-Mat

Making them public has been an incentive to keep working on them, which means they are playgrounds that are always ready for more play.