Picking up old projects
It’s week 4 of LMT2 (Let’s Make Things Together) and the idea I wanted to start with — a blogging platform aimed at couples traveling together — turned out to be something I truly didn’t want to make. I blog here and there, but not enough to really be hitting the limits on any platform and creating a new platform doesn’t seem like it will provide the impetus for me to want to blog more.
Instead, I decided after the first week of the experiment that I would pick up my old project, Resgen, and give it not only a facelift, but a brain transplant.
For a bit of background, Resgen is an app to tailor resumes to job descriptions to help you get more interviews. It worked well-enough and was in a steady state for a while, so I left it alone. But I have always thought it could be better: better interface, better functionality, and better results.
So, I dove back into the code and am pushing for a v2 by the end of LMT2. (I'll do a dedicated writeup when it's done!)
Picking up an old project is a bit surreal — you see code you wrote, knowing better now what should have been done, but appreciate past you for hacking it together and getting it to work anyways. I see the glue holding things together (some aging and cracking) that no one else does, and have immediate ideas on how to improve it.
If you have an old project, I definitely encourage taking another look at it with fresh eyes — there could be an insight you have now that you didn't have before and it could make all the difference.