Silly programs from almost 15 years ago
While I’ve been doing machine learning / data science for the last 7 years, and primarily working with python and web apps for longer, the beginning of my career saw me developing client-server applications with Windows Forms and IIS.
About 15 years ago I was just starting my professional coding career. I was junior, eager to learn, and had a lot of time and energy to tinker around.
At some point I stumbled upon TransparencyKey and TopMost, a pair of properties that allowed you to develop widget-style apps that always stayed on top but could be mostly transparent (to the mouse as well as the eye.) Combined with some Win32 API functionality, this could be used to do some really cool stuff. For about 2 years, 90% of my side projects would involve those properties. (Fixated? Me? No way)
I envisioned a whole suite of whimsical toys to liven up our dreary corporate workstations. Being junior, time after time I fell to the classic side project pitfall: I’d get excited by some idea, get to a working proof of concept, and move on to the next idea thinking I’d come back later to finish it up. Which, you guessed it, never happened.
