Arma Events

With every new year, old projects are coming back to life once again. Let's review what went wrong before and what can we do differently this time.

Arma Events long time no see!

I tried to build this project few years ago, prior to my FE departure. Well, I already had a functional "version" of this project online - made with boilerplate colorlib free admin template, hosting only basic functions. I probably still have a backup of this online somewhere (note to self: find it!). But the concept is much more developed, connecting players, teams and providing everyone with tools for easy management, organization and sharing of information.

Simply put, this has the potential of becoming a major Arma tool, recognized by many and cherished forever. The problem always was, that I didn't had energy or time, sometimes both.. My personal projects always gravitated towards abandonment on my part, because I lost energy, drive or just simply had no time to work on them. I inserted all my available resources into growing and securing my position in the bussiness sphere - with diminishing results most of the time. When I first re-evaluated my efforts and tried to assign some kind of value to my time-to-reward ratios, I figured that my personal projects, even though not rewarding me financially, always rewarded me with more value than my monetary efforts. The emotional rewards, status, and "social credit" in the community was always something that I loved about being a skilled programmer producing content for the community for free. 

Let's do it again

But differently this time! Let me approach the project from the fun and entertaining point of view. Let this project be a race for emotional reward. I believe that this can offer a lot of value to the community and I hope that the community will eventually find use and integration for this tool.

Last attempts failed primarily because of the programming environment that I used for web based projects before. I used to produce stuff in PHP with data being saved in MySQL (or MariaDB later), without any frameworks, boilerplates or libraries. I had my own private "framework" that I used to speed up my boilerplate phase or boost development cycle - but PHP production is still slow, even on latest versions with modern features and utilizing OOP. 

I dedicated year 2023 to properly learn ASP.NET (as I already know C# pretty well from windows app development) and maybe project my C# skills into web development. I loved the level of OOP you can reach with C# and that was simply not achievable in PHP. And having the toolset C# offers is a MAJOR advantage against PHP development enviro. And redirecting my focus to a single programming language would allow me to properly learn and memorize the deep stuff along with getting used to the proper techniques and standards that are being utilized in C# family.

To make it short, I succeeded - I was able to get the hang of ASP.NET and successfully produce a rather big project that we use at work. Migrating to this environment gives me a much better toolset and IDE itself is boosting my production speed multiple times. 

Elephant in the room

This all sounds great, I know. The main question remains - will I be able to sustain this drive and finish this project this time? And when? I guess I cannot promise any solid date and I cannot promise any results either. But one of my wishes for 2024 is to finish all my previous personal projects that were abandoned in some kind of usable state - Arma Events being one of those projects, I will try my best to actually bring it to life this time.

The machine is set to motion and production is underway, first results should be presentable at the end of January, but my brain can always just short out and block my efforts. However, I will use all my learned abilities to manage this on healthy level. See you in a month!