Programming For Your Users, Yourself, And The Older You; Or Writing Valuable, Maintainable, And Non Crazy Code

This is a poem that asks you to hide a File Manager like program, beneath your phone or web application.

Your file manager like creation will sit atop a tree like structure, very similar to a file system.

The data structure approach can be as simple as Object Oriented nodes with nested nodes, or an object with a Node Array, and an Edge Array.

In fact I recommend the node and edge arrays, because of how simple it is conceptually, a perfectly capable tree without the recursion.

The older you will remember to close the end user application, with some magical key combination.

And will be dropped, into the File Manager like program beneath.

The tree structure, will hint on and remind what the application structure is like.

The virtual file-system, represents all the resources of the logged in user.

This is also useful during development, where you can familiarize yourself with the technologies you will be working on...

By just having created the file system tree first, and perhaps a dashboard next to the file manager to help you keep track of Event Listeners and resource use.

But there is more to it, than just helping your older self remember the code, and helping your current self to a stable plateau, upon which you can just focus on the User Interface.

This also creates a powerful prototyping platform, where you can introduce Applications that help to build out some of the GUI components.

A simple Form Designer, that generates all the code you need.

A tiny little application to develop and tweak the color theme, which may just generate JSON, or sass array with colors.

And perhaps even a finite state machine designer, where you can reason about your UI components before writing the code, and generate it to get started.

A code generator just uses plain old templates, like EJS for example, which lets you script JavaScript with JavaScript.

Which brings me to the final and greatest benefit, because what you create here, is a product that can be sold as a Theme.

Except, you aren't just selling code snippets, but handful of code generators.

And if you take the PouchDB route, then potential buyers, can actually generate, customize, and run some applications, right in the browser.

Like it or not high quality themes seem to sell, here you can be developing your own private applications...

And making some money on the side, to further fund the development of your project.

A file system and a file manger, creates a self editable application.

And that is a very useful application, for those who want to get started on their own projects.