User blog:Taldin/It's Greek, Where's my map?

Yesterday I got to see some of the arcane stuff that goes on behind the scenes at HabitRPG. Using the Swagger UI, you can get a hold of information about challenges -- but it's definitely not in a form most mortals can use.

For one, the date stamps are in computer epoch. It takes a translator program to turn 1409580507011 into   Mon, 01 Sep 2014 14:08:27 GMT.

But then, you have to go through the code and pull out how many times someone clicks a habit or daily or to-do. It's an interesting computer programming project, and something I could do with a lot of time set aside to do it. But I've got so many other projects lined up, and this one's pretty daunting. I know how to do it - I've done it before. It's just a parser with a scanner to come up with the last value inside an enclosed list.

It can be done. I do have a programming degree, and I could probably bash it together in Java or something in a few days with no other distractions. Those are days I don't have these days. Of course, I could turn this into a To Do or a Daily and get it done.... but it'll take a bit of doing, and I have things on my To Do list that I haven't done in over a month. (Oops.)

Have you ever had something that was tantalizing to try and do, but you knew you couldn't right now, because there were more pressing things to do? I'm all about big ideas and no time to work on them....

Somewhere in there is a maximum project size that it can't be done easily. I'm not sure what that size is, but I'm glad keeping up with HabitRPG and this blog is smaller than that!

Taldin (talk) 21:38, September 7, 2014 (UTC)