I feel like I can’t help but repeat myself in these posts. It seems a good chunk of my life is focused on projects which I work on like mad for a few weeks and then shelve due to burnout or in favor of some other project I decide that I need to work on. Then I come back around to older projects — not new projects, mind you, ones I have shelved — and rather than try to pick up where I left off, I end up starting over mostly from scratch.

Nothing is built on nothing, and I find that I either refer to my older works for leverage, copying things that I remember worked well, or refine the parts that didn’t, or I continue on in a completely different area of the project that I had never worked on before. Ultimately, I believe that my projects do move forward, but in bits and pieces over the course of years. Were I to stick with them, though, I know that these projects would only take me weeks or months to actually complete.

This time, for No Discernable Reason, I have circled back to my “Star Citizen Organizational Website” which I am building for my org. There’s no real fire under it, considering A) the game isn’t going to release in my lifetime, and B) we use Discord for daily communication and Spectrum — Star Citizen’s social application — for what little effort we put into recruitment. Overall, I’m taking this long, pointless period to figure out a whole new way — to me — to build websites.

This is the third attempt to tackle this site. During the First Age, I focused on the pain-points of user management, specifically how to get a user registered, authenticated, and authorized to access certain resources. In the Second Age, I worked on a “three container solution” while setting up API endpoints, hoping that I could create a Docker-based ecosystem which would streamline deployment of the site, its API, and the data store.

Now in the Third Age, I am focusing on an entirely different section of API dealing with data management of all of the game-related content we want to keep track of, as well as expanding into territories of server-sent events (SSE) and webhooks for Discord integration. I have found many resources that have allowed me to streamline my data access and have a much better solution to a looming question of which data store I will end up using and how to future-proof the project in that regard with hot-swappable backend variations and a system of version control for updates.

I am hoping that at some point I will have all of the parts I have built over time, and can Voltron them into a complete, robust solution, but I fully expect there to be some serious agony over trying to connect these disparate siblings, with their anachronistic styles and priorities not aligning well enough to come together organically, despite them all sharing the same pedigree of What I Want To Accomplish With This Project.

I don’t really know why I spend so much time “from scratch” every time I come back to an older project. It’s the same with my games: after a time away, I forget how to play my advanced characters and rather than try to re-learn them in an out-of-the-way location in the game world, I’ll just spin up a new character and start over. Like my projects in my projects folder, I have a whole lot of old characters that won’t get a lot of play, as I am now focused on the more recent incarnation. Deep down I know I’ll eventually drift away again, and will return again, and will probably start over again, whether it’s a project or an in-game character.